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Vol. 26, No. 12 (2 parts) Part 2, December 2004 • Order # 26-30

FILE: MANUFACTURING

®

Fourteen Management Principles From the World’s Greatest Manufacturer

THE TOYOTA WAY
THE SUMMARY IN BRIEF
By Jeffrey K. Liker, Ph.D.

CONTENTS
Using Operational Excellence As a Strategic Weapon
Page 2

How Toyota Became TheWorld’s Best Manufacturer
Pages 2, 3

Eliminating Waste
Page 3

Long-Term Philosophy
Page 4

The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results
Pages 4, 5, 6

Add Value By Developing Your People and Partners
Pages 6, 7

Toyota is the world’s most profitable automaker. Its “secret weapon” is lean production — the revolutionary approach to business processes that it invented in the 1950sand has spent decades perfecting. Today, businesses around the world are trying to emulate Toyota’s remarkable success by working to implement the company’s radical system for speeding up business and service processes, reducing waste, and improving quality. It is a system that is derived from balancing the role of people in an organizational culture that expects and values their continuousimprovements, with a technical system that is focused on high-value-added “flow.” To help other companies learn to continually improve on what they do, Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker describes the results of his year-long research into Toyota and its managers, executives, suppliers and training centers. While detailing the company’sculture, processes and people, Liker provides readers with a management model that can be used to transform business across industries, and the key principles that drive the techniques and tools of the Toyota Production System and the management of Toyota in general. These principles embody the long-term philosophy, processes, results, people, partners and problem solving that drive theorganizational learning at Toyota, and can make the Toyota Way work for any organization.

Continuously Solving Problems Drives Learning
Pages 7, 8

What You’ll Learn In This Summary
✓ How to foster an atmosphere of continuous improvement and learning. ✓ How to satisfy customers and eliminate waste at the same time. ✓ How to get quality right the first time. ✓ How to groom leaders from within ratherthan recruit them from the outside.

Using the Toyota Way to Transform Technical and Service Organizations
Page 8

Build Your Own Lean Learning Enterprise
Page 8

✓ How to teach employees to become problem solvers. ✓ How to grow together with suppliers and partners for mutual benefit.
Published by Soundview Executive Book Summaries, P.O. Box 1053, Concordville, Pennsylvania 19331 USA
©2004 Soundview Executive Book Summaries • All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited.

THE TOYOTA WAY
by Jeffrey K. Liker, Ph.D.

— THE COMPLETE SUMMARY PART ONE: THE WORLD-CLASS POWER OF THE TOYOTA WAY

Using Operational Excellence As a Strategic Weapon
Toyota first caught the world’s attention in the 1980s, when it became clear that there was something special aboutJapanese quality and efficiency. Japanese cars were lasting longer than American cars and required much less repair. By the 1990s, it was apparent that there was something even more special about Toyota compared to other automakers in Japan. It was the way Toyota engineered and manufactured the autos that led to unbelievable consistency in the process and product. Toyota designed autos faster,with more reliability, yet at a competitive cost, even when paying the relatively high wages of Japanese workers. Equally impressive was that every time Toyota showed an apparent weakness and seemed vulnerable to the competition, Toyota fixed the problem and came back even stronger. Today, Toyota is the third-largest auto manufacturer in the world, behind General Motors and Ford, with global...