When I worked at the GM Powertrain Livonia Engine Plant in the mid-1990s, the hallway display cases held posters celebrating something called “The Livonia Philosophy.” It read, in part, like this: “through trust, communication, and respect for the individual, we will build an organization supportive of all employees in the development and utilization of their knowledge, ability, and skill.”
That sounds a lot like the Toyota Production System. Respect for people. Developing the people who do the work. The actual Livonia document even named “a high quality, competitive product in a clean and safe plant” as the goal.
It wasn't decoration to me. During my interviews, GM had promised a workplace built on the Deming philosophy. I was probably the only kid coming out of college who cared about that, having read “Out of the Crisis” on my own, for fun. My dad had attended one of Deming's four-day seminars and talked about it for years. So I took the job partly on that promise.
It didn't take long to see the gap. The plant ran on traditional command-and-control management, combative labor relations, and a blame-and-shame environment. The floors were slick with oil and grease. The communication, when results were poor, mostly came as yelling. The Livonia Philosophy was real once. Dr. Deming had taught workshops inside GM Powertrain in the 1980s, and a forward-thinking plant manager had modified that teaching into the Livonia approach. After a period of success, that manager was promoted, and the next one essentially hit the undo button. The posters stayed up. The practice didn't.
I've written more about that experience in a guest post for the Deming Institute. I bring it up here because it sharpens the question in the title. If a GM plant could hang Deming on the wall without following him, what does it look like when an organization actually does? Toyota is the company people point to. So, fair question: does Toyota follow Deming's 14 Points?
What Toyota Has Said About Deming
Toyota has never been shy about the connection. In fact, Shoichiro Toyoda, Toyota's former chairman, famously said,
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about what Dr. Deming means to our management.”
That's a striking statement from the person who led the company. Deming taught statistical methods and management thinking to Japanese industry in the 1950s, in a postwar moment when companies were rebuilding and genuinely open to a different way of working. The influence is real, documented, and acknowledged at the very top of Toyota. At the level of “did Deming shape Toyota,” the answer is plainly yes.
Where the 14 Points and the Toyota Way Line Up
Read Deming's 14 Points next to the 14 principles in Jeff Liker's “The Toyota Way,” and a lot of it rhymes. Constancy of purpose and Toyota's long-term thinking. Driving out fear and what we'd now call psychological safety. Ending the dependence on mass inspection and Toyota's idea of building quality in at the source. Improving constantly and the whole culture of kaizen.
I once laid these out side by side in a post comparing Deming's 14 Points and the Toyota Way, if you want the line-by-line. Liker has said the number 14 was mostly a coincidence, not a deliberate echo of Deming. The two arrived at their lists independently. What they share is a worldview: most problems live in the system, not in the individual, and management owns the system.
Where It Gets More Complicated
Here's where I'd be careful. It's tempting to treat the 14 Points as a checklist and grade Toyota point by point, as if the company passes or fails each one. That misreads both Deming and Toyota.
Toyota people I've talked with don't describe their work as “doing Deming.” They describe it as the Toyota Production System, or the Toyota Way, developed over decades through their own experiments, their own mistakes, and the contributions of people like Taiichi Ohno. Deming was an important influence. He was not the blueprint.
And the 14 Points were written for an American manufacturing audience at a particular moment. Some translate cleanly into any setting. Others target specific practices of that time. Asking whether Toyota “follows” all 14 the way you'd follow a recipe assumes the 14 Points were meant to be followed that way. I don't think they were. Deming was trying to change how managers think, not hand them a compliance form.
So the most accurate answer is something like: Toyota was deeply influenced by Deming, the two share a great deal at the level of philosophy, and Toyota built something of its own.
Posters Versus Practice
Which brings me back to those display cases in Livonia.
The Livonia Philosophy document, I later learned, had been signed by some thirty people. It used the right words. It named trust, respect, quality, safety. None of that kept it alive once a new plant manager decided otherwise. The words on the wall were never the problem. What happened, or stopped happening, in the meetings and on the floor is where you found out what the plant actually believed.
I've seen the poster version many times since, with Lean instead of Deming, or with whatever the current language happens to be. A poster is easy. Driving out fear is hard. Ending the dependence on inspection means rethinking how the whole place works, and that takes years, and it can be undone by a single leadership change.
So maybe the more useful question isn't whether Toyota follows all 14 Points. It's why one company can absorb Deming so completely that its chairman thinks about him every day, while another can frame his ideas, mount them in a glass case, and change almost nothing. And whether anyone in your own organization would notice if the posters came down.
