Page 18 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

xvi Foreword

Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering where he has remained
since. Jeff’s study of the auto industry and Japan developed through involvement
with David Cole and Robert Cole through the famous University of Michigan
US-Japan auto study. This led him to Toyota and the Toyota Production System,
where he found actual application of the STS approach he had begun studying
many years before. At Toyota, he felt he had at last found an organization in
which the social and technical systems were truly integrated.
Jeff, along with John Campbell, professor of political science, and Brian
Talbot, professor at the Michigan Business School, created the Japan Technology
Management Program—where I was also privileged to work for several years—
which had as its mission the study of how successful organizations in Japan man-
aged technology, recognizing that the competitive advantage that many Japanese
firms had gained in their respective industries came not from advantages in
“hard” technology—Toyota purchases stamping machines and robots from the
same sources available to GM or Ford—but from the way they managed the same
technology. The program focused particularly on the way some firms, notably
Toyota, attained holistic integration of technology with people, organization,
product, and strategy. While few Japanese firms would have explained it in
these terms, the difference lay in their socio-technical system.
David’s hands-on learning began on the plant floor when he was in the first
group of front-line supervisors from Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky, Camry
plant (TMMK) to visit Toyota City for supervisor’s training in the Summer of
1987. Toyota had “practiced” on NUMMI, and Georgetown was the company’s
first full-blown solo operation outside Japan. Working with the Commonwealth
of Kentucky, Toyota developed a comprehensive assessment that evaluated
100,000 applicants for an initial 3,000 jobs! David was one of a highly select
group of individuals chosen to be shop floor leaders. The selection process was
extensive, but it was just a prelude to the training and development process that
David would experience in the subsequent years. Toyota knew from the start
that the key to success at TMMK was going to be the degree to which the
company could—in short—establish the Toyota Way.
They didn’t call it “the Toyota Way” then. It was just “the way Toyota did
things.” The Toyota Production System was fully articulated by then, as was basic
company philosophy, especially in such areas as quality and human resources.
But the philosophy didn’t stop with those key functions; it played out in each
and every company activity. Just as David underwent training as a production
group leader, every leader at the new Georgetown operation, paid a similar visit
to Toyota City, spending time not only at Tsutsumi, the Camry production plant,
but also in their counterpart department at the company’s headquarters, in such
areas as accounting, purchasing, community relations, and facilities management.
TMMK community relations professionals learned how Toyota the company