Toyota is often cited as the inspiration for Lean, but its success is rooted in leadership behaviors, management systems, and a deep commitment to learning—not tools or slogans. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on Toyota’s approach to quality, continuous improvement, psychological safety, and respect for people. Many of these posts explore what leaders outside Toyota often misunderstand—and what truly matters if they hope to learn from Toyota rather than copy it.
Toyota Quickens Quest to Unseat GM As a friend in Detroit pointed out, it’s interesting that Toyota is allowing Fuji/Subaru to build Toyota vehicles in Indiana, might be the first time Toyota is allowing others to build their cars. I’m…
From today’s WSJ, in the article about GM’s possible plant closures: While the details of GM’s plans remain unclear, GM officials have said that their long-term strategy is to shift more production to lower-cost locations outside North America and to…
Toyota is on track to top GM sales: There are more articles today, including the WSJ, about the possiblity that Toyota will become #1 in auto production volume next year. “Industry experts also worry about quality problems if the company…
asahi.com：Point of View/ Kazuyoshi Abe: – ENGLISH Here is a piece from a Japanese newspaper that gives a pretty good short historical overview of Toyota’s entry into the auto business. Toyota only started making cars in 1937 and will most…
Here is the sixth, and probably final, installment of my tales from the NUMMI tour. You can revisit them by starting with Tale #1 and continuing on from there. One more important reminder from the NUMMI visit reinforced something I’d…
MySA.com : Printer Friendly Story From the same newspaper that brings you “The sun is hot” on the weather page. Don’t get me wrong, when I was at GM, I didn’t think the UAW was the more of a problem…
NUMMI Tour Tale #4: The Pull Gift Shop While the NUMMI plant would score very highly on almost any measure of visual management, you could still see on a tour that it wasn’t 100% perfect in its 5S compliance. In…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator?NUMMI Tour Tale #2: The Power of Reynolds WrapNUMMI Tour Tale #3: The Power of Why Back to stories about my tour of the Toyota/GM plant in Fremont CA. The NUMMI lobby has…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator?NUMMI Tour Tale #2: The Power of Reynolds Wrap I think, by now, that Toyota is pretty famous for its “5 Whys” approach for root cause problem solving. Asking why five times, in…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator? The NUMMI tour guide told an interesting kaizen story as we went past the body weld area. Car bodies are held and transported on metal carrier racks that recirculate through the welding…
Auto Week This article eventually reaches the conclusion I jumped to early on. Of course Toyota doesn’t outsource as much as the other automakers. Toyota’s own internal production can be cheaper and with better quality, I assume, than their suppliers.…
I really enjoyed my tour of the NUMMI plant last Friday. I’ll post my summary thoughts and impressions from the tour, but I wanted to post a few of the more interesting stories first. In a back part of the…
