The Toyota Way has been evolving within Toyota since the company’s birth as a producer of automatic looms in 1926. Founder, Sakichi Toyoda, based the originalToyoda Automatic Loom Works on deeply held beliefs that concerned both the purpose of the company and how all of their members should be treated. His original reason for creating an easier-to-use wood loom was to help the women in his small farming community who were working their fingers to the bone. Expanding from this founding principle, the purpose of the company has always been twofold: to benefit society as well as their team members who make up the fabric of the company.

The Toyota story starts with Sakichi Toyoda, who grew up in the late 1800s in a remote farming community outside of Nagoya. At that time weaving was a major industry, and the Japanese government wishing to promote the development of small businesses, encouraged the creation of cottage industries, which subsequently spread across Japan. Small shops and mills that employed a handful of people—mostly housewives—was the norm. As the story goes, Sakichi was dissatisfied by the hard work he saw his mother, grandmother, and their friends putting into spinning and weaving, and wanted to find a better way to relieve them of this punishing labor.

This was an age in which inventors had to get their hands dirty. As an example, when Sakichi first developed a power loom, there was no power available to run the loom, so he next turned his attention to the problem of generating power. Steam engines were the most common source of power, so he bought a used steam engine and experimented with running the looms from this source. He figured out how to make this work by trial and error and by getting his hands dirty—an approach that would become part of the foundation of the Toyota Way. As Eiji Toyoda (1987) later wrote:

The looms didn’t budge because the steam kept leaking. Faced with no other choice, they took the engine apart and found that the leaking was caused by worn piston rods. Although they knew that the problem could be remedied by turning the rods on a lathe, the mill was located in the middle of nowhere; there just weren’t any lathes nearby. So they spent the whole night filing the rods down. When they put the steam engine back together again, it worked.

Throughout his life, Sakichi was a doer, not a manager. He was a great engineer and was later referred to as Japan’s “King of Inventors.” While Japan sometimes is viewed as a country that copies the technology of others, Sakichi Toyoda was an innovator: he continuously improved his automatic looms and ultimately sold the rights of one to the Platt Brothers in England so he could help his son start up Toyota Motor Company to expand into the growing business of automotive production. He said to his son Kiichiro “Everyone should tackle some great project at least once in his life. I devoted most of my life to inventing new kinds of looms. Now it is your turn. You should make an effort to complete something that will benefit society.”

This quote tells us much about Toyota culture. We get a sense of the influence of the Toyoda family as founders and leaders continuing today. We can feel the emotion underlying the company. It is not a business as much as a calling for the greater good and the engine driving it is continuous improvement.

Kiichiro was sent by his father to the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University to study mechanical engineering. He focused on engine technology. He was able to draw on the wealth of knowledge within Toyoda Automatic Loom Works on casting and machining metal parts. Despite his formal engineering education Kiichiro followed in his father’s footsteps of learning by doing. Shoichiro Toyoda, son of Kiichiro, described his father as a “genuine engineer” who, “… gave genuine thought to an issue rather than rely on intuition. He always liked to accumulate facts. Before he made the decision to make an automobile engine he made a small engine. The cylinder block was the most difficult thing to cast, so he gained a lot of experience in that area and, based on the confidence he then had, he went ahead.”

Kiichiro Toyoda, like his father, was passionate about innovations, big and small. He was quoted as saying, “We are working on making better products by making improvements every day.”

Kiichiro Toyoda’s cousin, Eiji Toyoda, took over the company when Kiichiro took responsibility for the company’s financial hardship in the 1940s and resigned. Eiji Toyoda led Toyota for decades through its most difficult times struggling to survive and through its most prosperous times growing it into a global company. He never wavered from his fundamental belief in what makes the company run,  “People are the most important asset of Toyota and the determinant of the rise and fall of Toyota.”

The Toyoda family members also seemed to have a knack for identifying talent from outside the family. A series of inspirational leaders have followed in their footsteps each making a unique and profound contribution to the development of Toyota as a company and as a culture. Taiichi Ohno is known for his leadership of the Toyota Production System. Famous chief engineers like Tatsuo Hasegawa who led the design of the first Corolla and Kenya Nakamura who headed up the first Crown program helped lead the creation of Toyota’s remarkable product development system. Shotaro Kamiya was one of the inspirational leaders behind Toyota Motor Sale’s obsession with “customer first.”

Contemporary leaders have continued the tradition of developing an internal culture focused on continuous improvement and respect for people and intensely focusing on making positive contributions to the world at large. We will learn later in this chapter about Fujio Cho and his passion for documenting and spreading the Toyota Way culture globally. His predecessor, Hiroshi Okuda, took every opportunity to emphasize the role of Toyota as a citizen of the world, “We wish to make Toyota not only strong but a universally admired company, winning the trust and respect of the world.”

Companies in many industries have been attempting to learn “best practice” approaches from Toyota, and are particularly interested in eliminating waste and developing lean processes that are efficient and reduce cost. Lean processes are part of the story at Toyota, but there is much more involved that allows Toyota to infuse quality into its corporate culture in locations around the world. While there have been many documented successes of duplicating aspects of Toyota, few organizations have approached creating the type of culture that enables Toyota to develop exceptional people relentless in their focus on continuous improvement. The challenges for these companies lie in their culture.

Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Education India Pvt Ltd. Excerpted from Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker and Michael Hoseus, Rs. 450.00; Copyright © 2008; All Rights Reserved.

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