Behind Toyota's success
BUSINESS BOOK REVIEW
In 'Managing to Learn,' the author distills lessons on Toyota's A3 management philosophy from decades working there.
In 1983, John Shook became the first Westerner to work for Toyota. His job was to help the Japanese carmaker transfer production to the U.S., which involved interpreting and explaining Toyota's legendary "lean" manufacturing to people who had never heard of it.
Although even Toyota cannot escape the effects of the current recession -- Fitch, the ratings firm, has just lowered its credit rating -- since the mid-1980s Toyota has overtaken Ford to become the second-biggest carmaker in the United States.
Every gain in its market share has come at the expense of the Big Three -- Ford, GM and Chrysler -- and it is a real possibility that they will not survive this recession in their current form.
Toyota: A review in Monday's Business section of the book "Managing to Learn," about Toyota Motor Corp.'s management philosophy, described its author, John Shook, as the first Westerner to work for Toyota. Shook was the first U.S. worker at Toyota world headquarters in Japan.
Toyota's rise generated a flood of books, starting in 1990 with "The Machine That Changed the World," about its many tools, techniques and practices, broadening recently to a growing interest in its approach to management.
Somehow, however, its secret of success has remained elusive. In "Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor, and Lead," Shook, now director of the Japan technology program at the University of Michigan, distills lessons from decades of experience with Toyota, which he tries to present in a way Westerners can not only understand but also apply.
Although written mainly for lean "converts" and published by a lean specialist, this may be the first book that actually helps outsiders connect the dots and get a glimpse into how Toyota ticks.
It does so, however, via an artificial and sometimes irritating device: an extended invented story about how a young middle manager and his boss set about tackling a problem with the translation of technical documents from Japanese to English.
Managers put on a single piece of paper everything anyone needs to know about a problem.
Ostensibly, it is all about their application of a single Toyota management tool, "A3 decision-making," which forces managers to put on a single piece of paper everything anyone needs to know about a problem: why it matters, what is causing it, what we want to achieve, how to achieve it and how we will know we have been successful.
The book charts the young manager's journey. He starts out jumping to a conclusion and investing his ego in promoting and defending it, only to discover he is wrong.
