Inside the Mind of Toyota
March 13th, 2006 by HalI can't read enough about Toyota. I first started in 1988 with one of the only books available at the time, A Study of the Toyota Production System from an Industrial Engineering Approach, by Shigeo Shingo. It was an impossible read. The translation wasn't good. Later, Andrew Dillon did another translation. The current version of that book is quite readable. Since then, Productivity Press published over 300 books on Japanese approaches to managing production, design, and the enterprise. One of the newest is Inside the Mind of Toyota, by Satoshi Hino, translated again by Andrew Dillon, with a foreword by Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way.
I've just opened the book — only skimming through it — but I was struck with the following passage from the Translator's Foreword. Dillon identifies three important lessons in Hino's text:
- Theory and principles matter.
- Documentation is critical.
- An organization's success is intimately linked to how its leaders think about work, people, and society.
This is not an ordinary book. It is a book written with a purpose. According to Dillon, that purpose is to learn enough about what is behind Toyota's success and then surpass them.
I get on an 6-hour flight today. I'll let you know more about the book on the other end.
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March 13th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Hal,
While the TPS is a successful approach for Toyota and is cited as “the way to success” by many, there is a core issue that is rarely discussed.
http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/11409?pg=0 is a starting point in the dicussion of “how can we learn from Toyota, while not necessarly replicating?”