4. What is the Toyota Way?

The Toyota Way is a term that you are going to start hearing a lot more. It was the name of a best selling book by Prof. Jeff Liker on Toyota Motor Corporation. Also it is a term that company uses more and more in place of or to accentuate TPS. I can only speculate on why the term Toyota Way started but here are a few conjectures from my experience of working at Toyota. First the term TPS naturally puts the emphasis on production and while this is fine it also serves somewhat to exclude other groups in the company that are vital to Toyota’s success and overall way of doing business. Using the term Toyota Way is more inclusive and universal to all parts of the business.

Second, the term itself suggests that there is a Way or notion of how Toyota believes things should be done and this is a key aspect that is often overlooked. Toyota believes in developing people by solving problems and improving the process is part of your daily responsibility. In order to do this you need some notion of the ideal and what is wrong in the current state of your process, then you need to test and apply countermeasures in a structured way to see if they lead to improvement. If it works then you need to standardized that method and deploy it to other similar processes that might benefit. The Toyota Way at its core is very much about the scientific method and the improvement spirit of Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA) management.

Third the actual name in Japanese for TPS is Toyota Seisan Houshiki. If you can read and understand kanji characters the “hou” and “shiki” in the above phrase actually mean “methods” and “styles” in Japanese. In short there is nothing wrong with the western translation that has become Toyota Production System, but in some respects a Toyota Production Ways and Methods might be a more apt although cumbersome title.