The Toyota Way
"This book will give you an understanding of what has made Toyota successful and some practical ideas that you can use to develop your own approach to business."--Gary Convis, Managing Office of Toyota Fewer man-hours. Less inventory. The highest quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer. In factories around the globe, Toyota consistently raises the bar for manufacturing, product development, and process excellence. The result is an amazing business success story: steadily taking market share from price-cutting competitors, earning far more profit than any other automaker, and winning the praise of business leaders worldwide. The Toyota Wayreveals the management principles behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability. Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a renowned authority on Toyota's Lean methods, explains how you can adopt these principles--known as the "Toyota Production System" or "Lean Production"--to improve the speed of your business processes, improve product and service quality, and cut costs, no matter what your industry. Drawing on his extensive research on Toyota, Dr. Liker shares his insights into the foundational principles at work in the Toyota culture. He explains how the Toyota Production System evolved as a new paradigm of manufacturing excellence, transforming businesses across industries.
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27recommend
79mentions
66people
2008–2026years
39% recommend57% neutral4% critical
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What Hacker News says
- I have similar experience and agree with your book recommendations. Depending on your vertical I would add the Toyota Way later to understand factory design and efficiency. It’s interesting to read back to back.
- > each product item is customized to meet demand
No, each product run is customized. Products are already known and fixed (they have been built before, with the same specs), the demand is unknown (in advance). There is a subtle difference between this and your “make CRUD for xyz”, where XYZ is always something different (if it wasn’t, we’d just reuse the thing we wrote the last time).
I would encourage everyone to read a book about TPS (The Toyota Way is a good one), and compare/contrast that with Kanban as an agile software methodology.
- As others have noted Peopleware is a good book as is Slack by the same author. Slack will likely conflict with the philosophy of PMP focused organizations but it's very relevant. I strongly discourage relying on the many popular management books like "5 dysfunctions of a team". Sorry the all knowing CEO doesn't exist and as a manager, you won't know all the answers either. Personally, books focused on team empowerment, e.g., books on scrum, The Toyota Way, etc. are probably more helpful. Management, as far too few recognize, is about team empowerment and staff development. It's not about you and being the boss.
- The Toyota Production System was established during Shoichiro Toyoda's leadership. It is the company's "operating system" if you will, and has made an enormous impact, both in the auto industry and in other fields such as IT.
"Lean" manufacturing, a term from Womack & Jones, is based on their research into this.
If you want to dive in, here is my reading list for essential books on how Toyota came to build high quality cars at scale, and how it transfers to other disciplines.
W. Edwards Deming - the grand old man of the field, building on a strict statistical discipline. His book "Out of the Crisis" is a wonderful treatise on his thinking including his famous "14 Points for Management". This is definitely a must read that will change the way you think about management and quality. Deming provided the inspiration for the quality movement that powered post-war Japanese manufacturing.
Taiichi Ohno - one of the greatest industrial innovators of the 20th century, the father of the Toyota Production System. After spending his career relentlessly optimizing manufacturing at Toyota he wrote the book "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production" that describes his work.
Womack & Jones - Their books are great and it is well worth to read them all to see a lot of the principles and case studies for lean thinking. Also, it is quite interesting to see that software development is now rediscovering some of the things that manufacturing learned much earlier - in the case of Toyota as early as in the 1950s and 1960s. Begin your studies with "The Machine That Changed the World", a five-year study of the global auto industry from MIT and go on with the "Lean Thinking" and "Lean Solutions". They give a fascinating perspective on manufacturing and plenty of examples of the lean principles and they applications. These are the books that brought lean to the mainstream.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck - with a background in manufacturing and software they were leading the effort to translate the concepts of lean to software development. They have written two great books, "Implementing Lean Software Development" and "Lean Software Development - an Agile Toolkit". Both books are well worth reading a present a both the principles and lot of cases in a friendly, colloquial manner. Highly recommended!
Matthew May - I really like his approach to elegance and simplicity. May has worked with Toyota and their corporate university and his book "The Elegant Solution" offers insight into their innovation process - the principles it is built on and the practices that make it work.
Jeffrey Liker - his "The Toyota Way" is a very good introduction to the application of lean methods at Toyota. This is one of the best lean books I have read. Definitely a favourite!
This list covers up to around 10 years ago. Please comment with recommendations for more recent books on the topic.
- Here's a short list:
Strategy/Ops: • The Innovator's Dilemma - Clay Christensen • The Toyota Way - Jeffrey Liker • The Beer Game - duh :-)
Leadership: • High Output Management - Andy Grove • The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz • Love is the Killer App - Tim Sanders
GTM: • Start With Why (Tedx Talk) • Benefit ladders (Human Centered Design exercise good for product AND positioning) • Everything on Kellblog • Everything from Andy Raskin (especially "the Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen")
- The book 'The Toyota Way' and a book by Shigeo Shingo (helped develop the TPS) - 'Kaizen and the art of creative thinking' changed the way I think about completing tasks or achieving goals. While they are more based on manufacturing the lessons hold up well for any discipline. Basically, once you realise that everything has room for improvement (nothing is ever perfect!) and it's consistent small changes/improvements that make things better, it takes the pressure off trying to do things exactly right the first time. Treat tasks/projects as experiments, come up with a few hypothesis, pick one, do it and asses how it went and what can be improved or throw it away. At least you're getting stuff done and you might just end up with something better than you would by trying to force a perfect job/product from start to finish.
