Toyota philosophy… there is only one way: to be the best.

“Imagination is more important that knowledge” philosophy of Toyota.

You are a consultant, you are an executive of a company, you r planing want to be. You’re an engineer, or charged with manufacturing or department. You are a student of Business Administration or engineering. If you want to understand global companies, you can not ignore one of the most studied industrial phenomena of recent economic history.

When I visited Japan in October 2007, I took a day to sleep in Nagoya (splendid city) and headquarters of Toyota. Next day, a factory of Toyota in Toyota City. This city has no fewer than 411,000 inhabitants and I remember that is home to no less than 8 factories.

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The book “The Toyota Way” (Liker, 2003) popularized the Toyota philosophy in the English-speaking world. However, very few authors have attempted to explain Toyota from a local Spanish-European point of view. One of this is Dr. Jose Berengueres, who lived in Japan for 5years. Encouraged by his acquaintances consultants and colleagues he conducted an excellent document of 60 pages in spring 2007. “The Toyota production system, recontextualized”

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This document tells the story of Toyota spiced with juicy anecdotes on the origins of Toyota’s philosophy: the hard sweatty begginings at the workshop as well astaste of success. Some excerpts

"At headquarters of Toyota they were very alarmed by the progression of Chrisler,
so much so that one day soemone bought a Chrisler Neon and disassembled
- press publicly invited - to analyse the style: Ah… here in this piece
that is not in view they (the gaijins) have used three anchorages
instead of four…… "

"In Japan, at that time (the Meiji era), there was no textile industry as
we take for granted today.(No Zara, No H&M) There were no automatic looms.
The fabric was woven into a primitive loom in which a thread is passed
from one sideto another two groups of vertical columns of threads
pre-stretched. Weaving cloth was a long and laborious task.
Sakichi's house had a loom and, as was customary in many other houses,
his mother spent long hours in it. Sakichi, sorry seeing her mother toiling
hours and hours... starts tinkering with the idea to automate the loom and
thus relieve her mother. It would be the beginning of a series of inventions
that would lead to the creation of multiple companies and textile operations.
Subsequently, the ensuing economic success allows the family to accumulate
capital needed to start production, three decades later, of the 1st Toyota car:
the 'type AA' ..."

The interesting thing is the description of the systems management and production, you will see words like “dumb” and “waste”, also a visit to Denso Academy, or “Just in time” or Kanban or an example of start up “Kaizen” at Denso. To better understand what is Kaizen read my post, “more about Japan and Japanese… ..”

The appendix also portraits uncompromising culture glimpses on Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan and Honda.

On page 22 you will see a chart that compares Japan with Spain on linguistic terms and how this differences affect the working ethos in both countries.