The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence Through Leadership Development

by Jeffrey K. Liker, Gary L. Convis, Jim Meskimen (Narrator)

The Missing Link to Toyota-Style Success--LEAN LEADERSHIP

Winner of the 2012 Shingo Research and Professional Publications Award

"This great book reveals the secret ingredient to lean success: lean leadership. Not only is it a pleasure to read, but it is also deep and enlightening. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in lean: it's both an eye opener and a game changer."
--Michael Balle, Ph.D., coauthor of "The Gold Mine" and "The Lean Manager"

"This will immediately be recognized as the most important book ever published to understand and guide 'True North Lean' and the goal of perpetual business excellence."
--Ross E. Robson, President and CEO, DnR Lean, LLC, and the original Director of The Shingo Prize

"An excellent book that will shape leadership development for decades to come."
--Karen Martin, Principal, Karen Martin & Associates, and author of "The Kaizen Event Planner"

About the Book:

TOYOTA. The name signifies greatness-- world-class cars and game-changing business thinking. One key to the Toyota Motor Company's unprecedented success is its famous production system and its lesser-known product development program. These strategies consider the end user at every turn and have become the model for the global lean business movement.

All too often, organizations adopting lean miss the most critical ingredient--lean leadership. Toyota makes enormous investments in carefully selecting and intensively developing leaders who fit its unique philosophy and culture. Thanks to the company's lean leadership approach, explains "Toyota Way" author Jeffrey Liker and former Toyota executive Gary Convis, the celebrated carmaker has set into motion a drive for continuous improvement at all levels of its business. This has allowed for: Constant growth: Toyota increased profitability for 58 consecutive years--slowing down only in the face of 2008's worldwide financial difficulties, the recall crisis, and the worst Japanese earthquake of the century. Unstoppable inventiveness: Toyota's approach to innovative thinking and problem solving has resulted in top industry ratings and incredible customer satisfaction, while allowing the company to weather these three crises in rapid succession and to come out stronger. Strong branding and respect: Toyota's reputation was instrumental in the company's ability to withstand the recalls-driven media storm of 2010.

But what looked to some to be a sinking ship is once again running under a full head of steam. Perhaps the Toyota culture had weakened, but lean leadership was the beacon that showed the way back.

In fact, writes Liker, the company is "as good and perhaps a better model for lean leadership than it ever has been." of innovation and growth. Yet, "Industry Week" reports that just 2 percent of companies using lean processes can likewise claim to have had long-term success. What the other 98 percent lack is unified leadership with a common method and philosophy.

If you want to get lean, you have to take it to the leadership level. "The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership" shows you how.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Management, Self Help, Personal Development

Audible Audio

First published October 17, 2011

About the author

Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and principle of Optiprise, Inc. Dr. Liker has authored or co-authored over 75 articles and book chapters and nine books. He is author of the international best-seller, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer, McGraw-Hill, 2004 which speaks to the underlying philosophy and principles that drive Toyota's quality and efficiency-obsessed culture. The companion (with David Meier) The Toyota Way Fieldbook, McGraw Hill, 2005 details how companies can learn from the Toyota Way principles. His book with Jim Morgan, The Toyota Product Development System, Productivity Press, 2006, is the first that details the product development side of Toyota. He is doing a series of books focused on each of the 4Ps. The first books are (with David Meier), Toyota Talent: Developing exceptional people the Toyota Way (May, 2007) and (with Michael Hoseus) Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (January, 2008). His articles and books have won eight Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence and The Toyota Way also won the 2005 Institute of Industrial Engineers Book of the Year Award and 2007 Sloan Industry Studies Book of the Year. He is a frequent keynote speaker and consultant. Recent clients include Hertz, Caterpillar, AMD, Android, Areva, Rio Tinto Mining, Tenneco Automotive, Jacksonville Naval Air Depot, US Airforce Material Command, Johnson Controls, Harley Davidson, Eaton, and Fujitsu Technical Services.

Source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~liker

Reviews

[Bart-Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a (fairly recent) practitioner of Scrum, I felt the urge to get an inside story on the mother of all lean operations: Toyota. What a great company! This organization is truly inspiring in many ways and this book is a very good account on the operations. The book gives good examples on how Kaizen is implemented, how organizational- and self development is completely integrated in the DNA of the company. It is amazing how human centric this company is. Both authors have hands on experience of the Toyota way, which makes the story all the more compelling. As a student of martial arts (Tomiki Aikido) I already had the pleasure of getting to know a little more about Japanese culture, but with this book I'm truly inspired. Very well recommended.

[Isil Arican · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that every leader should read. Provides great insight regarding leadership, and how it differs from the old school of thought regarding managing people. The author describes Toyota Way and how it worked, also provides insights to apply manufacturing world lessons-learned to any industry.

A great read if you are a new manager, a great read if you took a leadership role and climbing the ladders in executive world, a great read if you are already a seasoned leader and want to improve yourself further.

[Bianca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to the Instaread summary since I'm not a huge car industry fan. I can appreciate leadership stories and decided to give it a shot.
It was surprisingly insightful and educative. I had no idea Toyota was so big and that the Japanese and Buddhist culture had such a big influence over its success. Hence the difficulty of being copied in the West.
Focusing on as little waste as possible, humble leadership based on team play, and a no-lay-offs policy (seen as a waste of resources invested in that department to that point), Toyota's success is very Eastern and unique. Will definitely check out their cars when the time comes for me to get a vehicle some day!

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book about how Toyota develops leaders. A great introduction to how they approach business and challenges.

[Vivek Shah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into how The Toyota Way and the Toyota Production System is more than just an efficient and successful way to make cars, but a management and leadership philosophy that can be applied in different contexts.

Jeffrey Liker and Gary Convis discuss various examples of crises and challenges that Toyota has faced, especially in America, such as major recalls and establishing a presence in the US market, and how following principles such as hoshin kanri, shuhari and going to the gemba, have enabled Toyota to consistently be one of the most successful carmakers over the last 40 years.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book wasn't as handbookish as I thought it would be, which is a good thing. It touched on some topics that I have learned about in my b-school management courses (i.e. servant leadership and systems thinking). Its a really fascinating, engaging book.

[Regis Hattori · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first chapters are very interesting because they seem to be more tangible and can be applied in a micro environment like a team or department. I would rate as 5 stars for the first 4 chapters and I recommend to anyone in any job position.

After chapter 5 the book focused on how to manage the entire company and becomes more abstract. The differences between the "normal" way and Toyota-way are less clear in the macro and it caused me a little confusion. Nevertheless, my view about the last chapters can be wrong as I am not a manager.

I stopped reading in the middle of chapter 6.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ad un certo punto ho interrotto la lettura per riuscire ad apprezzare ed assorbire le nozioni :-)
Consigliato ad ogni imprenditore, manager o appassionato di crescita personale!

[Bob Wallner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good insight to how Toyota trains and leads! Liker & Convis are great team.

[Hao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book itself is a bit dry to read, there is no exciting stories foretold here about how a hero manager came in and saved the world. Instead it talks about how many companies tries to copy Toyota's lean leadership, but actually get no where. There are no magical solutions to challenges, it takes hard working employees and leaders to solve those challenges one at a time. Where most companies get it wrong is thinking lean and leadership can be taught over a few off site days. But in reality it takes years to develop the correct skills, or more importantly the mindset to seek problems as well as be motivated enough to attempt to solve them.

The problem solving skill at Toyota isn't top down, it is bottom up. The people doing the daily work solve the problems, not some star manager or big name CEO. The leaders are there to guide and coach, they don't tell others how to solve problems. So many people make this mistake, myself included, sometimes it is easier to just tell the other person how to do things or worse do it for them. But there is no learning with this approach, that person doesn't improve and if this happens often then the company doesn't improve.

After finishing the book, it definitely left some thought provoking ideas in my head. Which is my exact definition of a good book!

In terms of rating I was between 4 or 5 stars, at the end I gave it a 4 stars since it was a bit dry and I did struggle to finish it.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up through the 80s when Japanese domination through leading quality seemed complete. When I myself worked at GM in the 90s on collaborations with Isuzu I saw the quality-centric approaches like poka-yoke and genchi genbutsu ("Go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions"). In the next decade starting in software engineering, I saw the pollination via "extreme programming", etc. of Toyota Production System concepts like Just In Time, etc. This book is a historical overview of the company and its enlightened management style. This includes an analysis of the Toyota Recall Crisis. This is largely through the lens of the management career of Gary L. Convis over forty-four years in the automotive industry employed by General Motors, Ford, Toyota, and eventually CEO of Dana Corporation. He is well known for his “lean” thinking management style.

[Jakub Dembiński · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wydawało mi się, że wiem trochę o lean, jednak okazuje się, że bardzo mało. Przykłady zawarte w książce świetnie pokazują podejście Toyoty do rozwoju i patrzenia zawsze długoterminowo. Chodzi głównie o strategię rozwoju, poprzez ciągłe doskonalenie się, ale według Toyoty liderzy mają zadawać pytania, a nie rozwiązywać problemy. Nakierowywać na odpowiedzi, ale ich nie dawać. Dzięki temu ludzie się rozwijają i sami zgłaszają się z pomysłami jak usprawnić procesy.
Metoda ciągłego ulepszania procesu to najlepsza droga do perfekcji, którą Toyota chce osiągnąć.

Toyota pokazuje również, że nie wolno się odsuwać od codziennych procesów. Dlatego menadżerowie wyższych szczebli, muszą wracać do prac podstawowych (często fizycznych), aby nie stracić kontaktu z rzeczywistością.
Metoda Lean bardzo mocno opiera się na nawykach. Dzięki temu możemy usprawniać proces, kiedy zadanie jest dla nas już trywialne lub nawet automatyczne!

Dobrze było poznać filozofię Toyoty od podstaw.

[Grigori Paslari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book right after reading about 12000 lay-offs in google is especially interesting. Toyota manages to remain steady growth oriented with high self-development culture and investment in the people. The recipe is so simple, yet very few companies are ready to sacrifice short-term goals to achieve bigger long-term ones... It is a company-level example of a lack of Delayed Pleasure Gene. And another super important thoughts for myself:
- to be a good leader you have to master the doing first (yeah, I also know managers with degrees in management and lack of any experience in the thing they are managing, but this is where the difference between manager and leader comes from)
- don't bother staying too long in a company where leadership is not mature and doesn't see as one of it's primary goals growing people, including leaders. (don't believe written company values, actions - is what matters)

[Gregg R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hired some consultants some years ago that spoke about various business philosophies like Lean Manufacturing. Unfortunately, when my relationship with these consultants didn’t end positively, I was left me with a bad taste in my mouth towards the Lean approach. I recently hired a new consultant who spent years working for a company that had used Lean principles and he changed my perspective on the benefits of the Lean mindset. This book was not written by your typical consultants spouting trendy ideas and lofty platitudes - these authors actually learned to be leaders in Toyota. They willingly share their own personal foibles and successes as they learned the new business culture. I was inspired by their story and I have a new appreciation for Lean leadership. I’m excited to implement these lessons in my company.

[Tuukka Aaltonen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last part of the book felt a bit repetitive and not adding as much value. It felt like the authors were mainly exclaiming how great lean is and Toyota is and so on without bringing many new insights anymore. However, other than the ending the book was great and had two main strong points. The first one was that it explained the philosophical aspects of lean, how it has been used at Toyota and some specific methods that Toyota uses to implement it. The other interesting part was how lean has been used elsewhere in other organisations that are in different situations. This could have been explained better at times because in some parts it was very high level and focused mainly on saying how well lean suited in the situations of other organisations if implemented correctly.

[Mariusz Gorzoch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding. If you are in the continuous search for improvement, growing yourself, adjusting ways you are working, and helping others to grow then that book is for you. The author leads you thru Toyota way of leading the company, explaining how they build their leaders and by this reveal what steps you should take in order to strive for perfection. In a sense it's a story against current way of learning where the focus should be put on understanding basics, practicing them till you achieve perfection in repetition and only then you are allowed to get a bit of freedom in experimenting and growing your own ways to do things. For sure that book would be something I'll be comming back as this is not one time read.

[Yates Buckley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting introduction to the world of Toyota production but the book is mostly focused on describing what works from the inside, and mot enough work is done to try to bring you into this world.

It is clear that Toyota has invented something important in manufacturing and even beyond, but this book goes to reenforce the idea that you could only learn what it has done by doing, and therefore don’t bother reading the book?

[Daniil Lanovyi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book brilliantly structured, highly informative but still easy to read. It's just the near-perfect mix of storytelling, the underlying theory and data to back up authors' claims. The book should be highly beneficial to everyone who is currently in a leadership role or aspires to be in one.

“The use of a good process that engages people is much more desirable, even if it does not initially achieve all the results.”

[Ashok sriram · Rating 5 out of 5]

The road to long term sustained success can not be achieved by taking short cuts and applying quick fixes. This is the overarching theme of this leadership development book.

Toyota’s leadership development style is heavily influenced by the Japanese culture and this book revolves around the explaining the concepts that define this style. Though I felt the last couple of chapters didn’t offer much, the book overall was an engaging read.

[Cris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d highly recommend this book especially for Toyota’s approach to leadership. Other companies should learn from them! Toyota is leading the future of leadership.

In summary, Toyota is showing that servant leadership is working.
A leadership based on continuous personal growth, continuous learning, openness, supporting the team and giving them the spotlight
It resonated with me on so many levels.

[Morten Kaasik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction into the world of lean leadership. Clearly outlining the benefits of the Toyota Way over some methods used in many western companies. Repetitive at points but in general a good insight to lean leadership. I liked that it really emphasised the importance of self-improvement, self-reflection, continuous improvement and deep meaningful work.

[Crystal Kipping-wyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book, excellent concepts. However, I finished this book through audible and would not recommend that medium. They provide graphs etc that is not best suited for audible books. I would have enjoyed it more if I had the references visually in a book, although they do provide the graphs in Pdf form with the audible book.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good book. Lots to think about, lots to drive for personally, maybe try and push up the chain. But this book was written from the top. If you don’t have too down buy in, you are basically just trying to work on yourself and that isn’t a terrible thing!

Lots of repetition of topics and saying. Some times it was a slog to get thru, but a good read!

[Emil Fichtner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book about real lean management and that it is not just a few coaches and one or two day training to have it running. reading recommendations to all lean and agile coaches in a manufacturing company.
Best part is the last chapter, about companies who are trying to copy that without investing in people and thinking it is possible to succeed by running shortcuts

[Gonçalo Cabecinhas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A leitura de The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership permitiu-me desconstruir diversas ideias pré-concebidas sobre o que significa, na prática, ser líder dentro de uma organização. A obra demonstra que a liderança Lean não se resume à aplicação de ferramentas ou metodologias, mas assenta, antes de mais, numa transformação comportamental e cultural.

[Alexandria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audio book and really enjoyed the book. The real life examples were helpful to understand how Toyota has been so successful and how they view leadership. I’ve been a part of a company that has tried to emulate Toyota’s principles and failed at sustaining them, and it was interesting to listen to this and understand why.

[Tom Erik Frydenlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fin bok om hvordan man har et sterkt fokus på å bygge en lederkultur og hvordan man også kan håndtere endringsprosesser på en fin måte. Fokus går også mot "servant leadership" som er spennende å høre om I en så stor organisasjon. Anbefales.

[Jordan Self · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a ton of great info in here, but it is written like a high schooler trying to hit a page limit where everything is repeated. If you are absolutely set on learning everything in this book then go for it, but if you don't have the resolve then don't bother.

[Adriana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. What did I just read?

The core concepts of this book were good, but as a whole work, this book was unnecessarily long, incredibly shallow, and uncritical. That said, this is a MUCH BETTER BOOK than the second edition, which is UNREADABLE.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mediocre compared to The Toyota Way (2nd Edition), which was one of my top 3 reads of 2024.

Lots of repetitive concepts in this one; it reads like a Cliffnotes version. If you’ve read TTW, skip this one.