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The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

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The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

(116 customer reviews)

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9780071392310ING

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How to speed up business processes, improve quality, and cut costs in any industry

In factories around the world, Toyota consistently makes the highest-quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer, while using fewer man-hours, less on-hand inventory, and half the floor space of its competitors. The Toyota Way is the first book for a general audience that explains the management principles and business philosophy behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.

Complete with profiles of organizations that have successfully adopted Toyota's principles, this book shows managers in every industry how to improve business processes by:

Eliminating wasted time and resources
Building quality into workplace systems
Finding low-cost but reliable alternatives to expensive new technology
Producing in small quantities
Turning every employee into a qualitycontrol inspector

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Product Details

Author:	Jeffrey Liker
Hardcover:	330 pages
Publisher:	McGraw-Hill
Publication Date:	December 17, 2003
Language:	English
ISBN:	0071392319
Product Length:	9.42 inches
Product Width:	6.34 inches
Product Height:	1.23 inches
Product Weight:	1.44 pounds
Package Length:	9.2 inches
Package Width:	6.1 inches
Package Height:	1.3 inches
Package Weight:	1.3 pounds
Average Customer Rating:	based on 116 reviews

Features

The Toyota Way
English
First Edition
Hardcover
gelatine plate paper

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review: 4.5

( 116 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 49 found the following review helpful:

Clearly shows you why so many fail to copy them Nov 04, 2006 By M and G
I've read this book a few times, and got our factory excited by it as well. We read it 2 chapters a week as a group, with a volunteer facilitator reviewing the content of the chapters in a weekly session. Suggest you start with this one and then read "Creating a Lean Culture" by David Mann and then "The Toyota Way Fieldbook" by Jeffrey Liker. A must read for those interested in Lean Manufacturing or Self-Directed Workteams.

Pro:
-Shows the commitment of Toyota to their methods and philosophies. By commitment they mean a willingness to pursue your transformation for at least 10 years, which is why I think so many fail... lack of commitment.
-Provides building blocks upon which to apply lean tools or lean toolkit
-Philosophy is quite detailed for a few hundred pages, appears thorough and complete so if you want to, you can create a similar systems-based approach

Con:
-Not a recipe for you to copy... no shortcuts or cutting corners here.

Neutral:
-Not much detail on "tools" which is out of scope for the content of this book

Bottom line: I think that this book is true to the philosophies of Toyota as I've directly observed from the 4 or 5 different senseis (former Toyota executives turned consultants) I have had the chance to work with. I only recommend a few books, this is one of them. Pairs well with "Creating a Lean Culture," by David Mann as a way to extend the lessons learned in The Toyota Way.

36 of 38 found the following review helpful:

Highly Recommended! Aug 04, 2004 By Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract"
This book is like a Toyota vehicle: not necessarily fancy, but extraordinarily capable of getting you from point "A" to point "B." Author Jeffrey K. Liker's thorough insight into the continual improvement method known as "The Toyota Way" reflects his experience with the Toyota Production System (TPS) and his knowledge of its guiding philosophies and its technical applications. He explains why Toyota has become a global symbol of passionate commitment to continual improvement and efficiency. Toyota's success as the world's most profitable automaker is no accident and now, thanks to this book, it's no mystery, either. Liker drills down to the underlying principles and behaviors that will set your company on the Toyota Way. The book reflects years of studying Toyota's philosophy: it is well mapped out, straightforward and exceedingly although not daringly innovative. We highly recommend it to anyone striving to improve their organization's operational efficiency.

20 of 21 found the following review helpful:

Good insights on the thinking of Toyota management Dec 09, 2004 By Michel Baudin
This book puts Toyota back where it belongs: front and center in the world of the lean enterprise. The idea that Toyota just originated lean and that others have since taken it further is a fallacy that has lately been creeping into publications and conference presentations. The reality is that Toyota is still far ahead and that the vast majority of companies that claim to be lean are only "kinda, sorta" lean, with managements that simply have not understood the approach.

The book has a visible structure that the reader can use to zoom in on topics of interest. Fourteen principles are stated upfront, and then a chapter is devoted to each of these principles. The writing is clear, and many outside sources are acknowledged with a thoroughness that is uncommon in business books. In particular, 28 Toyota executives are acknowledged or quoted, which gives the book the flavor of an authorized rendition of the company's philosophy.

The book's greatest strength, the closeness of the author to the company's management, is also its main limitation. As an academic, the author could have assumed a less worshipful stance. For example, rather than taking management statements about wanting to do right for society as a whole at face value, he might have pointed out that they sound like obligatory recitations of Confucian values, and that it is arguable that flooding the world with cars is in the best interest of the human race. Also, without attacking the company, he could have made its portrayal more nuanced and vivid by including more points of view, such as those of line workers and former employees who may have a different perspective than current top managers.

The executives quoted in the book clearly feel that the philosophy is more important than the technical tools of the production system. This insight, however, has come to them as a result of using the tools intensively for many years, and the reader should not be misled into thinking that it is possible to bypass the tools and go straight to the philosophy.

I also have a few minor quibbles with the way the book is produced. The fourteen chapters covering the fourteen principles have numbers that don't match those of the principles, so that, for example, Principle 6 is covered in Chapter 12. This is confusing when looking up cross references. The subject of this book also calls for abundant illustrations, but there is only one for every seven pages, and no photographs. Finally, I think that the use of long words where short ones would do should be identified as the 9th category of waste. We don't need to hear about a "paradigm," As Tom Wolfe's hero in "A man in full" points out, the only thing it ever does is shift. Saying "non-value-added waste" where "waste" would suffice also strangely suggests that there might be an opposite called "value-added waste."

All this being said, this book is a good read based on intimate knowledge. I recommend it to anyone involved with lean, and particularly to managers and engineers in the auto parts industry who want to sell their products to Toyota.

10 of 10 found the following review helpful:

Finally, a book on more than Lean Tools! Sep 25, 2005 By James K. Franz
When I was hired as a Process Engineer by Toyota and shipped off to Japan to learn how to be a Toyota engineer, I was lucky enough to be a part of the system that Dr. Liker describes in his book. I can, and do, use the text as a guidepost as I look back at the things we did and can better understand the 'Why' versus just the 'What'. The book does an excellent job in laying out a solid structure for the sometimes ethereal concepts within the Toyota Production System and ties them together in a way that is both easy to understand as well as communicate. With this book, we finally have a body of work that transcends the basic Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull, Perfection framework (don't get me wrong, I strongly support the Womack/Jones framework at operational levels) and gets the reader behind the results and into the thinking processes that drive the behaviors that deliver the results. While some readers that have written in and panned the book seem to think that Dr. Liker is trying to say Toyota is 'perfect', I think that they have, unfortunately, missed the real message in the book. That is too bad for them, because the message is clear and powerful. One respondent sounded like a frustrated UAW organizer, in fact. I can only encourage them to re-read the text and try and gain a deeper understanding of the concepts that are presented. I'm on my sixth reading and the pages are quite dog-eared, sticky noted, and written all over.

Long story short: If you want to get 'into' the thinking processes that drive the most successful automobile company on the planet (can this be disputed?) and begin to apply these processes to your own area, plant, or company, this is the book for you! Let's not forget, Toyota is building a successful business by bringing manufacturing jobs TO America, not rushing headlong to China, India, or some other Asia-Pacific destination. That speaks volumes to the inherent power of Lean to deliver Value to the customer.

16 of 18 found the following review helpful:

A Start Dec 30, 2005 By Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist"
Liker's "The Toyota Way" provides a good introduction for someone not familiar with "lean production" or "The Toyota Production System (TPS)." On the other hand, I prefer the materials written by Tachii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo (Toyota Production System developers) for their greater clarity (if you excuse the sometimes labored translations) and detail.

Liker begins by pointing out that in the 1980s it became clear that Japanese cars were lasting longer than American models and required less repair. (They were also cheaper to build - even if you ignored lower labor costs.) Toyota's profit for FY '03 exceeded G.M., Ford, and Chrysler - combined! Toyota has the fastest product development process in the world.

Key to the TPS is a commitment to continuous improvement, directed at "adding value." Adding value, however, is defined from the customers' point of view - specifically excluded are activities such as overproduction (creates unneeded transport, tracking, and storage space needs; also increases risks of obsolescence and quality problems), waiting (eg. watching a machine, lack of parts, bottlenecks, downtime - perhaps for line changeover), transportation, defects, and searching (eg. parts, and paperwork - retrieving, or finding the required information within it). Liker also reports that most processes are about 90% non-value-added (waste); if one focuses on value-added "process-time", the proportion of waste is usually much higher.

Keys to eliminating/reducing these problems include continuous flow (one-piece production cells), stopping to immediately fix problems, fast changeover (eg. easy line modification for alternative models), using visual control (eg. marked inventory boundaries, alarm lights), use of "pull" systems and "kanban" to eliminate overproduction (without complex computer systems), helping (and standardizing) suppliers, asking "Why?" five times when a problem arises to ensure correction of "root causes" in a manner that helps other areas as well (eg. why the puddle (oil leak), why the oil leak (gasket problem), why the gasket problem (wrong specifications), why wrong specifications (Purchasing Dept. focus on initial acquisition price), why Purchasing Dept. mis-focus (wrong reward critia) --> correct underlying problems so that does not continually recur), eliminating variation (eg. reduce suppliers, tighter tolerances).

Liker points out that American supermarkets provided Ohno with the idea for the TPS "pull" system (emptying of product space by customers results in a visual cue for staff to restock and reorder).

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