Page 33 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

vehicles held their value much better than its competitors’ prod-
ucts. Customer loyalty was tops in the industry. The company
was profitable in every vehicle segment, from small cars to mas-
sive SUVs. It had even made the Prius—the world’s first mass-
production hybrid—profitable, a feat that, when the vehicle was
launched, industry observers had claimed could never happen.
But Toyota’s position was more dominant than even these
impressive figures might suggest. Toyota had literally revolution-
ized manufacturing, process engineering, and quality, setting new
standards for operational excellence that had become goals for
companies in many industries. Toyota changed the way a large
portion of the world thinks about quality and how to continu-
ously improve any process. Today, almost every large organiza-
tion, regardless of its sector or country, at least speaks the jargon
of built-in quality, lean, and just-in-time operation, although
only a select few have carried the concepts to anything approach-
ing the level that Toyota has.
At the end of 2007, it seemed that everyone loved Toyota,
even such diverse constituencies as Wall Street investors and
hard-core environmentalists. Millions of books explaining Toy-
ota’s approach were sold, not least The Toyota Way, and compa-
nies were spending billions of dollars trying to understand, learn
from, and replicate the Toyota model.*
It’s Toyota’s overwhelming success that makes it hard to be-
lieve today that there was a time when “Made in Japan” was a
synonym for junk rather than high quality, or when American
car companies had a stranglehold on the global car business. Or
that Toyota Motor Corporation began with a single self-taught

* Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004). .

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