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Toyota’s Lean Management Program Explained (with Real Life Examples)

by Frank Stuart , on Nov 1, 2023 3:45:00 AM

If you’ve ever searched for information online about the Toyota Production System, you've probably seen a variety of house-shaped graphics. But even though we all know what a house is, understanding what the TPS house graphic means can be a challenge — especially when some of the words are Japanese.

In this article, I’ll explain the house graphic and Toyota’s lean management principles. Because I worked for Toyota and have spent many years as a Toyota lean practitioner, I’ll share insights you won’t find anywhere else including:

• How the Toyota management system boosts employee retention
• Three common misinterpretations of Toyota’s lean methodology
• Several real-world examples and a customer case study

The Toyota Production System is What Makes Toyota #1

Toyota has made the best-selling forklift in North America since 2002. That’s a long time to be number one. How do they do it? By following the Toyota Production System (TPS). 

What is Toyota Lean Management vs. The Toyota Production System? Toyota Lean Management (TLM) is a system that takes the principles of the Toyota Production System and applies them to other industries such as construction, supply chain, healthcare and of course manufacturing. I’ve yet to find a business that doesn’t benefit from the Toyota production management system.

Toyota Principles Improve Retention and Your Bottom Line

Improving efficiency and customer satisfaction are the best-known reasons for following Toyota’s lean management practices. Most people don't know it can also improve employee retention.

Hiring and retaining qualified workers was the number one challenge reported in MHI’s 2024 Top Supply Chain Challenges survey . The responses come from more than 2000 manufacturing and supply chain industry leaders from a wide range of industries. 

This isn’t the first year hiring and retention created major heartburn for supply chain operations, and it likely won’t be the last. If finding and keeping good people is something your organization struggles with, TLM can help with that too .

Here’s my version of the TPS house.

Why is it a House?

Most people use a house-shaped graphic to explain TPS because the function of a house is to preserve what’s inside . All the parts of the house interact with each other to protect what’s the business and its people — from the groundwork to the pillars to the roof.

The Groundwork

Respect for People, Long-Term Thinking and Continually Improve

Respect for People, Long-Term Thinking and Continually Improve are fundamental management philosophies that drive all policy and decision-making under the Toyota way.

Respect for People is not about being nice (although that is important). This principle is about creating a home-like atmosphere where everyone is encouraged and supported to reach their full potential. 

EXAMPLE: A supervisor has monthly one-on-one meetings with each associate to:

• Review personal performance
• Discuss issues with work processes
• Uncover opportunities for improvement

This mentor-mentee program develops people from within. Associates move into higher and higher positions so eventually, the people leading the company not only know the product but understand the work.

Respect for people also includes being mindful of how decisions in one department affect another. Uncoordinated decisions can negatively impact the customer.

EXAMPLE: If sales and marketing decide to have a big sale the weekend before Thanksgiving, the extra orders could overwhelm an already understaffed shipping department — creating delays for the customer and/or increased overtime expenses.

Last but not least, respect for people means providing stable employment. This leads us to the next fundamental principle… 

Long-Term Thinking — During COVID and the supply chain challenges that followed, many companies made the hard decision to lay off workers. I was in the training department at Raymond during this time.

Instead of letting workers go, we chose to strengthen the company by training associates and improving processes. We developed online training programs on various topics for hundreds of associates in various roles. These actions and this type of thinking goes back to the 1950s when Toyota decided to focus on building a strong, stable company for the long term. The economy will cycle up and down, but because our people are our most important asset, we must take care of them and protect them, even during economic downturns.

Short-term decisions, like letting experienced and tenured employees go, can improve the bottom line in the short term, but long term it hurts the business. All too often, corporate culture lives and dies on a quarterly report. This is short-sighted. When times are good, you have to squirrel money away in your war chest to protect the company and its people when times are bad .

Continually Improve – It is said in business, as in life, we are either growing or dying. A structured focus on continual improvement ( kaizen ) and challenging the status quo ensures a company stays competitive and growing.

EXAMPLE: We challenged the team who reconditioned our forklifts this year. At the beginning of the year, our lead time was 12 weeks. By mapping the process, improving flow and using a kaizen philosophy, we are now at 6 weeks. We are not satisfied with this improvement and have further challenged the team to cut the lead time in half again by the end of this year.  

The Foundation

Organize, Standardize, Optimize

The next level of the TPS house is all about creating an efficient work environment. It starts with a clean, orderly workspace where the next tool (or whatever the worker needs) is right there and not hidden in a pile of clutter.

If we don’t give people an organized workspace and standards to follow, we’re not helping them be successful. Even worse, we’re wasting their time. It goes back to respect for people.

EXAMPLE: The litmus test I used in the factory was to have a workstation set up with all the necessary tools. If I could take a tool away from the workstation and the operator couldn’t tell me within five seconds what was missing, that meant we had more work to do to. 

To be clear, it isn’t about telling people: you must do it this way or to make changes for the sake of making changes. The goal is to:

• Find the best way of doing things for the people who are doing the work
• Develop standards and best practices
• If a better way is found, everyone starts using that new way instead

That last bullet point is the principle of kaizen showing up again. Toyota Lean Management is an ongoing process where small, incremental changes result in measurable improvements to quality or reduced cost, cycle or delivery times.

FYI, we haven’t gotten to the actual Toyota Production System yet. The groundwork and the foundation are the basis for TPS. The system doesn’t work without establishing the groundwork and creating a solid foundation. 

Creating optimized workspaces and processes are deceptively simple assignments. It’s really easy to make work hard and it’s hard to make work easy. When you’re stuck in chaos it can be hard to see the way out. 

The foundation of TPS helps make work easy. Once an orderly, efficient system has been established, we work on the two pillars.

TPS Pillars: The Toyota Production System

Just in Time & Continuous Flow

The first pillar is all about having what you need, when you need it. Waste, in the form of wasted time or excess inventory, should be avoided. 

Back in 2021, Bloomberg and other news organizations excitedly reported how Toyota had abandoned its “just in time” philosophy because it started stockpiling computer chips. This is just one example of how Toyota principles are misunderstood by the Western world.

Misunderstanding #1 Here’s what most news outlets got wrong: After the earthquake and tsunami in 2011, Toyota reevaluated the lead time required for semiconductors and other parts. Their assessment revealed they were unprepared for a major shock to the supply chain, such a natural disaster. 

To ensure a continuous flow of chips to their factories, Toyota required suppliers to carry a 2-6 month supply of semiconductors. When COVID hit, the news reported Toyota was “stockpiling” chips when, in fact, the company was simply following a plan it had created ten years earlier. 

Our business training in the Western world is all about the balance sheet. Reducing inventory becomes a goal unto itself and that’s when things start to go badly. “Just in time” doesn’t mean “last minute.” It means keeping enough supply to ensure a continuous flow.

For Toyota, "just in time" meant a supply that could weather supply chain ups and downs. In 2021, when the chip shortage forced other automakers to stop their production lines, Toyota kept churning out vehicles and raised its earnings forecast by 54% . 

Visual Management & Zero Defects

EXAMPLE: Zero defects is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s an example of zero defects through visual management. The first thing Mr. Toyoda built was an automated loom for the textile industry. Occasionally, a thread would break and the operator wouldn’t see it. When this happened, the final product had to be thrown away. 

To fix the problem, Mr. Toyoda put a washer in the thread. If the thread broke, the washer fell off into the machine and it stopped. The operator could fix the problem without any waste (defective product). This also allowed one operator to oversee multiple machines.

Misunderstanding #2 Some people say Toyota Lean Management is basically the same as Six Sigma. I disagree. There are major differences between the two systems , but here’s a big one related to TPS Pillar Two: Six Sigma says you can have 3.4 defects per million operations. An “operation” is defined as a single action, such as attaching a wire or screwing a bolt. Building a jumbo jet requires millions of operations. Knowing 3.4 defects are permitted per million operations, would you rather fly on an airplane built by a company that follows Six Sigma principles or Toyota?

Another comparison you may have heard is one about a GM versus a Toyota factory. At GM, workers can get in trouble for stopping the line. At Toyota, it’s the opposite. If workers aren’t periodically stopping the line, managers get concerned. It goes back to the fundamental principles we talked about in the very beginning: respect for people and a culture of continuous improvement.

Toyota Lean Management Case Study

I worked with a hard cider manufacturer in upstate NY. The company was approaching its busy season and trying to build up its inventory to supply its distributor. Their “we gotta get this done” mentality caused them to overrun their facility.

A Foundational Problem The company thought they were following the “just in time” lean methodology. What they had was a mess. 

• Product and supplies were all over the place
• Equipment was haphazardly maintained
• They didn't have good standards on how to clean the kegs

A bottleneck in their system meant a new batch would get stuck behind the previous batch and unfinished inventory would pile up. Disorganization and stress led to unnecessary handling, damage and waste (wasted time and wasted product). 

After speaking to everyone who helped produce the cider, we created a list of best practices. Next, we helped the company organize, standardize and optimize the workspaces and procedures throughout their facility. With groundwork laid and a firm foundation in place, we were ready to move on to Pillars One and Two.

Guess what? The company had more than enough capacity. They didn’t need to build up inventory for their distributor. All they had to do was tame their operational chaos.

• Standardized practices saved time and improved product quality
• Clear processes and optimized workspaces helped everyone work more efficiently
• The company reclaimed space previously used to store inventory

Cider Batches Now Flow Continuously Once the bottleneck was subdued and equipment was kept in good working order, the cider company could run continuously with minimal downtime between batches. By staggering five batches to start over six weeks the company could meet customer demands.

The Core of the House: Its People

Grow People: Skills, Competence, Leaders

I added this circle in the center of the house (you won’t find it in other TPS house graphics) because I was fortunate to learn about Toyota’s lean management system directly from Toyota executives. 

The addition was inspired by a story I heard that really stuck in my mind. Mr. Onishi, Toyota’s president, visited a plant in Canada. He asked one of the plant managers to explain TPS. The manager described the house and the elements of zero defects, continuous improvement, etc. Mr. Onishi politely said, “It’s actually a people development process. We want to improve people’s skills and competence and grow them into leaders. Our goal is to promote people from within because they know the products, the customers and understand the work.”

The TPS Circle

Everything starts and ends with respect. 

Teamwork is about supporting the person who does the thing the customer is paying for. 

EXAMPLE: At SST, that means the technician working on a customer’s forklift.

Go and See — when a problem arises, the best way to find a solution is to observe the problem. 

EXAMPLE #1: At the forklift factory, units occasionally came off the line with the wrong counterweight. We observed the employee do everything right until one time he read the build sheet but chose the wrong counterweight. He was always on the go which created an opportunity for this mistake. By adding a simple step, stopping to highlight the weight info, the problem disappeared.

EXAMPLE #2: A warehouse thought they needed to buy more pallet rack and even had a rack consultant on-site while I was there. Turns out the company had plenty of rack space. They just needed to throw out three years of inventory they couldn't sell. The executive team almost wasted thousands of dollars on rack they didn’t need rather than take a hit on their balance sheet.

Challenge does not mean I had a challenging day because two associates didn’t show up for work. It means aiming for the stars and making it to the moon.

To generate significant improvements, you need an aggressive challenge and a team that’s committed to reaching a common goal. It changes your approach. To keep the space analogy going, consider all the technological innovations we enjoy that came from putting a man on the moon .

Misunderstanding #3 Toyota’s Production System strives for 100% customer satisfaction by eliminating wasteful activities. Many business leaders incorrectly believe running lean means using cheaper materials or reducing staff. By now you know this isn't the Toyota way. Building a strong house requires leaders who respect their people and think long-term. 

Companies that refuse to think beyond the bottom line will always struggle to stay competitive. Their short-term savings on cheap materials create long-term losses as customers become dissatisfied. They will also waste money hiring and training people who leave when they aren’t treated with respect. 

Sometimes I have to have a conversation with new clients about helping team members overcome challenges. When something goes wrong, some companies look for someone to blame (reprimand or fire) but that’s not the Toyota way.

Toyota’s approach focuses on fixing broken systems, not pointing fingers. We encourage leaders to challenge their team members to improve processes, but if the team member fails and gets fired after one try, how is that person’s replacement going to feel about taking on the same challenge?

The Roof of the TPS House

The roof protects the house and the people inside. A safe workplace that produces quality products at the lowest cost with the shortest delivery time in a good environment generates high morale and protects the business. By protecting the business, you protect the people inside and help them to grow into successful leaders. 

Request a Free Toyota Lean Management Consultation

If you’d like to reduce costs and turnover while increasing customer satisfaction, why not schedule a free consultation ? Toyota Lean Management has a low cost of implementation and is designed to help you get more out of your existing resources. 

During the initial consultation, we’ll talk about where your company is now versus where you’d like to be. The next steps depend on the individual client, but typically we’ll Go and See your space and look for:

• Inventory build-ups
• Excessive transportation
• Cluttered workspaces
• Unnecessary motion
• Producing more than what’s needed for the near-term
• Piles of defects

To learn more, contact us online or by phone (800) 226-2345.

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(Still) learning from Toyota

In the two years since I retired as president and CEO of Canadian Autoparts Toyota (CAPTIN), I’ve had the good fortune to work with many global manufacturers in different industries on challenges related to lean management. Through that exposure, I’ve been struck by how much the Toyota production system has already changed the face of operations and management, and by the energy that companies continue to expend in trying to apply it to their own operations.

Yet I’ve also found that even though companies are currently benefiting from lean, they have largely just scratched the surface, given the benefits they could achieve. What’s more, the goal line itself is moving—and will go on moving—as companies such as Toyota continue to define the cutting edge. Of course, this will come as no surprise for any student of the Toyota production system and should even serve as a challenge. After all, the goal is continuous improvement.

Room to improve

The two pillars of the Toyota way of doing things are kaizen (the philosophy of continuous improvement) and respect and empowerment for people, particularly line workers. Both are absolutely required in order for lean to work. One huge barrier to both goals is complacency. Through my exposure to different manufacturing environments, I’ve been surprised to find that senior managers often feel they’ve been very successful in their efforts to emulate Toyota’s production system—when in fact their progress has been limited.

The reality is that many senior executives—and by extension many organizations—aren’t nearly as self-reflective or objective about evaluating themselves as they should be. A lot of executives have a propensity to talk about the good things they’re doing rather than focus on applying resources to the things that aren’t what they want them to be.

When I recently visited a large manufacturer, for example, I compared notes with a company executive about an evaluation tool it had adapted from Toyota. The tool measures a host of categories (such as safety, quality, cost, and human development) and averages the scores on a scale of zero to five. The executive was describing how his unit scored a five—a perfect score. “Where?” I asked him, surprised. “On what dimension?”

“Overall,” he answered. “Five was the average.”

When he asked me about my experiences at Toyota over the years and the scores its units received, I answered candidly that the best score I’d ever seen was a 3.2—and that was only for a year, before the unit fell back. What happens in Toyota’s culture is that as soon as you start making a lot of progress toward a goal, the goal is changed and the carrot is moved. It’s a deep part of the culture to create new challenges constantly and not to rest when you meet old ones. Only through honest self-reflection can senior executives learn to focus on the things that need improvement, learn how to close the gaps, and get to where they need to be as leaders.

A self-reflective culture is also likely to contribute to what I call a “no excuse” organization, and this is valuable in times of crisis. When Toyota faced serious problems related to the unintended acceleration of some vehicles, for example, we took this as an opportunity to revisit everything we did to ensure quality in the design of vehicles—from engineering and production to the manufacture of parts and so on. Companies that can use crises to their advantage will always excel against self-satisfied organizations that already feel they’re the best at what they do.

A common characteristic of companies struggling to achieve continuous improvement is that they pick and choose the lean tools they want to use, without necessarily understanding how these tools operate as a system. (Whenever I hear executives say “we did kaizen ,” which in fact is an entire philosophy, I know they don’t get it.) For example, the manufacturer I mentioned earlier had recently put in an andon system, to alert management about problems on the line. 1 1. Many executives will have heard of the andon cord, a Toyota innovation now common in many automotive and assembly environments: line workers are empowered to address quality or other problems by stopping production. Featuring plasma-screen monitors at every workstation, the system had required a considerable development and programming effort to implement. To my mind, it represented a knee-buckling amount of investment compared with systems I’d seen at Toyota, where a new tool might rely on sticky notes and signature cards until its merits were proved.

An executive was explaining to me how successful the implementation had been and how well the company was doing with lean. I had been visiting the plant for a week or so. My back was to the monitor out on the shop floor, and the executive was looking toward it, facing me, when I surprised him by quoting a series of figures from the display. When he asked how I’d done so, I pointed out that the tool was broken; the numbers weren’t updating and hadn’t since Monday. This was no secret to the system’s operators and to the frontline workers. The executive probably hadn’t been visiting with them enough to know what was happening and why. Quite possibly, the new system receiving such praise was itself a monument to waste.

Room to reflect

At the end of the day, stories like this underscore the fact that applying lean is a leadership challenge, not just an operational one. A company’s senior executives often become successful as leaders through years spent learning how to contribute inside a particular culture. Indeed, Toyota views this as a career-long process and encourages it by offering executives a diversity of assignments, significant amounts of training, and even additional college education to help prepare them as lean leaders. It’s no surprise, therefore, that should a company bring in an initiative like Toyota’s production system—or any lean initiative requiring the culture to change fundamentally—its leaders may well struggle and even view the change as a threat. This is particularly true of lean because, in many cases, rank-and-file workers know far more about the system from a “toolbox standpoint” than do executives, whose job is to understand how the whole system comes together. This fact can be intimidating to some executives.

Senior executives who are considering lean management (or are already well into a lean transformation and looking for ways to get more from the effort and make it stick) should start by recognizing that they will need to be comfortable giving up control. This is a lesson I’ve learned firsthand. I remember going to CAPTIN as president and CEO of the company and wanting to get off to a strong start. Hoping to figure out how to get everyone engaged and following my initiatives, I told my colleagues what I wanted. Yet after six or eight months, I wasn’t getting where I wanted to go quickly enough. Around that time, a Japanese colleague told me, “Deryl, if you say ‘do this’ everybody will do it because you’re president, whether you say ‘go this way,’ or ‘go that way.’ But you need to figure out how to manage these issues having absolutely no power at all.”

So with that advice in mind, I stepped back and got a core group of good people together from all over the company—a person from production control, a night-shift supervisor, a manager, a couple of engineers, and a person in finance—and challenged them to develop a system. I presented them with the direction but asked them to make it work.

And they did. By the end of the three-year period we’d set as a target, for example, we’d dramatically improved our participation rate in problem-solving activities—going from being one of the worst companies in Toyota Motor North America to being one of the best. The beauty of the effort was that the team went about constructing the program in ways I never would have thought of. For example, one team member (the production-control manager) wanted more participation in a survey to determine where we should spend additional time training. So he created a storyboard highlighting the steps of problem solving and put it on the shop floor with questionnaires that he’d developed. To get people to fill them out, his team offered the respondents a hamburger or a hot dog that was barbecued right there on the shop floor. This move was hugely successful.

Another tip whose value I’ve observed over the years is to find a mentor in the company, someone to whom you can speak candidly. When you’re the president or CEO, it can be kind of lonely, and you won’t have anyone to talk with. I was lucky because Toyota has a robust mentorship system, which pairs retired company executives with active ones. But executives anywhere can find a sounding board—someone who speaks the same corporate language you do and has a similar background. It’s worth the effort to find one.

Finally, if you’re going to lead lean, you need knowledge and passion. I’ve been around leaders who had plenty of one or the other, but you really need both. It’s one thing to create all the energy you need to start a lean initiative and way of working, but quite another to keep it going—and that’s the real trick.

Room to run

Even though I’m retired from Toyota, I’m still engaged with the company. My experiences have given me a unique vantage point to see what Toyota is doing to push the boundaries of lean further still.

For example, about four years ago Toyota began applying lean concepts from its factories beyond the factory floor—taking them into finance, financial services, the dealer networks, production control, logistics, and purchasing. This may seem ironic, given the push so many companies outside the auto industry have made in recent years to drive lean thinking into some of these areas. But that’s very consistent with the deliberate way Toyota always strives to perfect something before it’s expanded, looking to “add as you go” rather than “do it once and stop.”

Of course, Toyota still applies lean thinking to its manufacturing operations as well. Take major model changes, which happen about every four to eight years. They require a huge effort—changing all the stamping dies, all the welding points and locations, the painting process, the assembly process, and so on. Over the past six years or so, Toyota has nearly cut in half the time it takes to do a complete model change.

Similarly, Toyota is innovating on the old concept of a “single-minute exchange of dies” 2 2. Quite honestly, the single-minute exchange of dies aspiration is really just that—a goal. The fastest I ever saw anyone do it during my time at New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI) was about 10 to 15 minutes. and applying that thinking to new areas, such as high-pressure injection molding for bumpers or the manufacture of alloy wheels. For instance, if you were making an aluminum-alloy wheel five years ago and needed to change from one die to another, that would require about four or five hours because of the nature of the smelting process. Now, Toyota has adjusted the process so that the changeover time is down to less than an hour.

Finally, Toyota is doing some interesting things to go on pushing the quality of its vehicles. It now conducts surveys at ports, for example, so that its workers can do detailed audits of vehicles as they are funneled in from Canada, the United States, and Japan. This allows the company to get more consistency from plant to plant on everything from the torque applied to lug nuts to the gloss levels of multiple reds so that color standards for paint are met consistently.

The changes extend to dealer networks as well. When customers take delivery of a car, the salesperson is accompanied by a technician who goes through it with the new owner, in a panel-by-panel and option-by-option inspection. They’re looking for actionable information: is an interior surface smudged? Is there a fender or hood gap that doesn’t look quite right? All of this checklist data, fed back through Toyota’s engineering, design, and development group, can be sent on to the specific plant that produced the vehicle, so the plant can quickly compare it with other vehicles produced at the same time.

All of these moves to continue perfecting lean are consistent with the basic Toyota approach I described: try and perfect anything before you expand it. Yet at the same time, the philosophy of continuous improvement tells us that there’s ultimately no such thing as perfection. There’s always another goal to reach for and more lessons to learn.

Deryl Sturdevant, a senior adviser to McKinsey, was president and CEO of Canadian Autoparts Toyota (CAPTIN) from 2006 to 2011. Prior to that, he held numerous executive positions at Toyota, as well as at the New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI) plant (a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors), in Fremont, California.

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The Toyota Way Management Principles

Lean principles   are based largely on studies of the Toyota Production System (TPS) from the early 1980s and influence manufacturing and service organizations across the world today. Read on to learn about the Toyota Way Management Principles.

In 2001, the Toyota Motor Corporation summed up their philosophy, principles, and values in an internal document they referred to as, “the Toyota Way 2001.” The document expanded upon TPS with additional leadership and management practices that have made Toyota one of the most respected companies worldwide.  Author Jeff Liker visited Toyota and summarized these principles in his 2004 book, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer . The book covers Toyota’s history, successes, and ideas with many great Toyota case studies. This post will focus on summarizing Toyota’s 14 Principles. How many of these principles are followed by your Lean organization?

Principle 1 : Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

Focus on doing what is right for your employees and your customer. This will lead to positive results over time. Don’t get caught up in chasing share price or short-term targets.

Principle 2 : Create continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.

Lean focuses on improvement through waste reduction. Toyota realized that striving for continuous flow forces a reduction in buffers, such as inventory and just-in-case production. A great way to identify wastes in a process is by asking the question, “what prevents this process from using a continuous process?” Write down the answers you hear as they will be wastes.

Principle 3 : Use pull systems to avoid overproduction.

Only complete work in response to a signal (Kanban) if pure flow is not possible. Pull systems are typically preferable to push systems since they minimize inventory, overproduction and waste.

Principle 4: Level out the workload (heijunka).

Eliminating waste (muda) is a typical first step in Lean. However, it is critical to also even out the work (mura) and reduce overburden on the workers (muri). Heijunka is a Japanese term for the leveling of output by both volume and mix. For example, if customers have ordered 5 product A and 4 product B it would be common to produce in the sequence AAAAABBBB.  Toyota would use heijunka to instead produce in the sequence ABABABABA.

Principle 5 : Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

Toyota understands the high cost of poor quality and empowers employees to “stop the line” when they experience a problem. A signal (andon) shows leaders where the problem is so it can be addressed immediately. Note that Toyota designs their process in segments with small buffers between each segment. Most issues are corrected in the 5-10-minute buffer time and do not shut down the full line.

Principle 6 : Standardized tasks are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.

When you begin to improve a process you must agree upon a standard method. Then allow employees to try out changes that improve upon that standard. Incorporate what works into the new standard, and train coworkers on the improved process. Require that all employees use this same improved process going forward.

Principle 7 : Use visual control so no problems are hidden.

Use 5S methods to standardize and optimize the work area and design simple visual systems at the place where the work is done. This will support flow and pull. For example, place a sign in a storage cabinet that shows what inventory should be located on each shelf. Another example of this principle is the A3 Improvement report, which captures an entire project on one piece of paper.

Principle 8 : Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

Work out a process manually before adding technology since new technology is often unreliable and difficult to standardize, therefore endangering the flow if not implemented correctly. Reject or modify technologies that conflict with your culture or that might disrupt stability, reliability, and predictability. Use technology to support people, not to replace people.

Principle 9 : Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.

Grow leaders from within, rather than buying them from outside the organization. Your leaders must be role models of the organization’s philosophy and understand the daily work so that he or she can be a great teacher. These leaders will be respected and most effective.

Principle 10: Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.

Respect for people is a key pillar of the Toyota Way management principles and Lean thinking, yet many Lean organizations do not emphasize this enough. Invest in your people. Committed employees will show up and work hard at completing and improving their job every day. As Toyota trainer and author Shigeo Shingo once said, “management must learn to shift their attention from fighting fires that should not be there to developing better people and processes.”

Principle 11 : Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.

Have respect for your partners and suppliers and treat them as an extension of your business. They really are when you expand your value stream map! Value them and challenge them to grow and develop. It is great to set challenging targets, but be sure to assist your partners and suppliers in achieving them.

Principle 12 : Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (genchi genbutsu).

Solve problems and improve processes by going to the source to personally observe and verify data and facts. Even high-level managers and executives should go and see things for themselves. That way they will have more than a superficial understanding of the organization’s operations.

Principle 13 : Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi).

Nemawashi is the process of discussing problems and potential solutions with all of those affected, to collect their ideas and get an agreement on a path forward. This consensus process, though time-consuming, helps broaden the search for solutions. Once a decision is made, the stage is set for rapid implementation. This principle is like the concept Jim Collins identified in Good to Great and describes in Great by Choice of firing bullets, then cannonballs .

Principle 14 : Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen).

Establish a stable process, use continuous improvement tools to determine the root cause of inefficiencies, and apply effective countermeasures. Use hansei (reflection) to openly identify all the weaknesses in your process and yourself. Now, become energized to implement countermeasures that will avoid those mistakes in the future. The goal is to develop a culture that encourages individual and team experimentation to learn what makes a process better.

The Toyota Way

Toyota has become one of the best companies in the world by honing these principles over many years. Are there any principles you believe they missed? Please review the book for more detail about the Toyota Way management principles, or feel free to ask questions in the comments section below. You may also want to review our post about leadership lessons from Toyota .

2 thoughts on “ The Toyota Way Management Principles ”

I applied for a Job at Toyota in Liberty NC about 10 days ago (2-14-24). I have been at my last Job for 26 years in the Contract management sector and have held multiple High Level positions and worked in 5 out of 6 divisions within the portfolio. I have helped managed a MV from 3M to 200M and worked nationally. I have taught many leadership classes (6 thinking hats, what would Disney do, DISC, multiple John Maxwell series, Gemba, Customer, culinary & Finance classes/workshops. After reading “The Toyota way management principles” and the 14 principles associated within the standards, I AM REALLY EXCITED about the opportunity to possibly work for the Toyota family!

Good luck! Hope you receive a job offer and get to work with this great company!

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The Lean Post / Articles / Leading and Learning the Toyota Way

Line Management

Leading and Learning the Toyota Way

By Tracey Richardson

June 24, 2013

Lean coach and LEI faculty member, Tracey Richardson, tells us why a learner's attitude is essential for effective leadership and in creating a lean management system.

I vividly remember the moment I was promoted to management at TMMK (Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Kentucky). My Japanese trainer came up to me, shook my hand, and asked me, “Tracey san, do you realize the expectation as a leader?” I thought it might be a trick question for a moment, but then I remembered my experience on the production floor observing other leaders at TMMK and nodded yes. He gazed back at me and said, “Please understand that as a leader you must now spend 50% of your time developing your people!”

I was still a little perplexed as to how I was going to do this. How would I make time for staff meetings? Answer calls? Take care of HR issues? Keep up with visual management , evaluations, key performance indicators? Maintain budgets? So on and so on. Had I taken on more than I could handle?

Many managers find themselves fire-fighting day-in, day-out. Unfortunately, some companies even promote based on how many fires get put out the quickest. This management style achieves short-term gains at best and slowly eats at company culture and team morale. It also sends employees the wrong message about how work gets done. I don’t think any manager would want their team members fire-fighting on a regular basis, but so often this is the leadership style that gets modeled for others. How do we remedy this? How do we gain knowledge and experience and train others to do the same simultaneously?

When I first took on more responsibility as a manager at TMMK, I felt the need to always have the answers. Isn’t the leader supposed to know everything?! I remember my trainer reassuring me, “It’s ok not to have all the answers or even to fail along the way.” Mostly he wanted to make sure the mistakes we made were learned from and not repeated. He reminded me that regardless of my level or role, I should always be “leading and learning.” No matter a leader’s experience level, there will always be opportunities to learn. The key—which I believe is the essence of how Toyota does business—was this: “As a leader, you must always study harder than your subordinates!” In the early startup phases at TMMK we were all leading and learning at the same time. Our trainers were trying to teach us a new way to think in a different language while we worked to set up systems, lines, and standards. And all of this was happening while newly promoted leaders were trying to learn their new role and teach others. We were building many new muscles at once, practicing how to think systematically, and teaching others how to do the same.

As an consultant/instructor, I still practice this type of thinking: leading and learning. Do I always have the right answers? No. Will I make mistakes? Of course. But my goal is always to study hard, listen, learn, and engage others. By doing this I practice my own cycles of continuous improvement myself so I can share my new wisdom immediately. As leaders, we must constantly find ways to teach and lead through our actions, not just our ideas. These actions should be in line with a PDCA -mindset that supports our business plan/ true north . When this is our guiding principle, when we are genuinely willing to learn and engage alongside team members in service of our true north, we are building a culture where people truly are the organization’s most important asset. This is that 50% rule my trainer was telling me about!

This is hard work, but if as a leader you are comfortable in your role then you probably aren’t challenging yourself or others enough. In all of my roles at Toyota, my goal was to just be one step ahead at all times. My leader did the same with me. This cascaded down through the organization. There was no room for complacency when the discipline was everyday-everybody-engage people in problem solving . On the other hand, this took pressure off of me because being present on the floor (at the gemba ) involving, engaging, and challenging people pushed me to ask the right questions and develop others’ thinking. And believe it or not, people started to mimic my actions as I mimicked the actions of my leader. This is how you “grow” more leaders.

Finally, leading and learning as a way of managing at TMMK was an expectation of our job, not a choice . This is a disconnect I see with companies trying to embed Lean; it’s viewed as this “add-on” program rather than an expectation and discipline. When we try to label Lean as something special, it loses its potential. In the late ’80s we didn’t call Lean anything, we just lead by our actions, which we knew had to support the business. Does Lean really need a label other than “doing our job?”

If you want to really lead and work for your people—I often teach about how Lean is a form of servant leadership —then you must demonstrate leadership at the gemba in real time, asking questions and understanding the current situation. Pass this mentality on to other leaders and subordinates. This is the key to success not only for you as the leader, but for the organization as a whole. Leading and learning creates long-term organizational sustainability through continuous improvement.

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About Tracey Richardson

Tracey has over 29 years of combined experience in various roles within Toyota and learned lean practices as a group leader at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky from 198 to 1998. She was one of the first team members hired, with the fortunate opportunity to learn directly from Japanese trainers. As…

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, the toyota way: adopting lean and agile manufacturing processes from the toyota production system.

Strategic Direction

ISSN : 0258-0543

Article publication date: 21 November 2022

Issue publication date: 29 November 2022

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

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This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The Toyota Way provides organizations with a blue print for adopting both lean and agile manufacturing principles, allowing them to gain a significant competitive advantage.

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The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

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(2022), "The Toyota way: Adopting lean and agile manufacturing processes from the Toyota production system", Strategic Direction , Vol. 38 No. 12, pp. 33-34. https://doi.org/10.1108/SD-10-2022-0131

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InfoQ Homepage Articles Scrum The Toyota Way

Scrum The Toyota Way

Leia em Português

Sep 27, 2018 15 min read

Ben Linders

Nigel Thurlow

InfoQ Article Contest

Key takeaways.

• There is no one-size-fits-all approach to being agile, or to scaling Scrum
• Lean and Agile are different things, but are great partners
• You can be lean without being agile, and you can be agile without being lean
• Executives must be fully engaged and part of the process
• Understanding complexity and multi-team systems is critical for success

Toyota Connected uses Scrum combined with the Toyota Production System to deliver Lean Production, enabling teams to deliver rapid PDCA cycles. Scrum of Scrums, Meta Scrum, and the chief product owner, are some of the approaches used to scale Scrum for multiple teams and products. Agility is not the goal. It’s a result, an outcome. 

Nigel Thurlow , chief of Agile at Toyota Connected, will talk about “Scrum The Toyota Way” at  eXperience Agile 2018 . This conference will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, on October 1 - 2.

InfoQ will be covering eXperience Agile with Q&As, summaries, and articles. This year’s conference theme, “Improving Through People,” is described below:

Discover the latest cutting-edge Agile practices by top industry leaders from around the world. eXperience Agile is more than just another Agile conference. This is an event that will highlight the most revolutionary applications of Agile being used today.

InfoQ interviewed Thurlow about how the DNA of Toyota connects to Scrum and agile, the challenges that Toyota Connected is dealing with, how they apply agile and what they have learned, the role of the product owner, how the C Suite fits into the agile world, and how Scrum and agile relate to the Toyota Production System and Lean Production. 

InfoQ: What’s the DNA of Toyota and how does that connect to Scrum and agile?

Nigel Thurlow: Everybody at Toyota understands the customer-first promise and the founding principles of TPS and the Toyota Way. When we discuss the value of embracing new technology and the digital world, we always have our DNA giving us the reasons why we need to do it: our customers.  Customer First was first coined in 1946 by the first president of Toyota Motor Sales Japan, Shotaro Kamiya, and is the principle of considering the need and desires of the customer when determining direction and strategy.  Simply stated, it’s delivering the highest quality, in the shortest lead time, for the lowest cost. Scrum is a framework to enable teams to deliver rapid PDCA cycles, where value is prioritized for the customer, and non value added work is eliminated.  It’s important to note that Scrum does not make you lean, and being lean does not mean you are doing great Scrum. Agility is a result or outcome, and is not the goal.  Scrum is one way to help achieve that, in fact it’s the best way to codify PDCA I’ve worked with.  Everyone knows what PDCA is, but no one actually knows how long a PDCA cycle should last for.  What we are trying to do with Scrum is shorten that cycle.  The cycle to inspect customer feedback (check) and to adapt to that feedback (act).  I sometimes refer to this as PDIA, Plan, Do, Inspect, Adapt. Just as Scrum does not make you Lean, being Lean does not mean you are Agile.  You can be Lean without being Agile, and you can be Agile without being Lean. They are different, yet very complementary concepts. We want to be Lean, delivering the flow of value the most efficient way possible, but we also want to be Agile by being able to respond rapidly to changes in customer or market demand, or responding to unknown events quickly.

InfoQ: What are the challenges that Toyota Connected is dealing with?

Thurlow: Toyota Connected (TC) was established as an agile startup to help Toyota respond rapidly to the changing connected-car technology space. We are not just talking about self-aware cars, but about providing a wide array of connected services to vehicle owners to serve their mobility needs. That’s the vision of Toyota’s President, Akio Toyoda, which we try to execute by leveraging the digital tools at our disposal -- from Artificial Intelligence to the Internet of Things -- enabling us to build the future of connected vehicle technologies. We are working in an ever-fast changing world where time to market is no longer measured in years, but often in months, and soon even shorter durations.  As the ability to upgrade cars in real-time becomes an everyday occurrence, as well as the increasing levels of live data vehicles are now able to stream, we have to be able to deliver the benefits and capabilities our customers seek.  Whether that’s helping an insurance company set rates through accurate and meaningful driver scoring, or being able to correct an operational problem with an over the air update, to creating mobility options like the Hui car-sharing service in Honolulu in partnership with Servco Pacific Inc, and to integrating Amazon’s Alexa into Toyota vehicles and studying advancements in data science and AI. 

InfoQ: How does Toyota Connected apply agile?

Thurlow: We practice and teach Toyota Production System (Lean) and Toyota Way principles, but we are also an agile company by design. TC was setup to behave like a startup, but with the stability and funding of a global corporation. We create an office environment for great engineering and technical excellence, that allows teams to thrive in a creative and open way.   Our small (typically five to six people) collaborative teams sit very closely together in open-space offices, with obeya rooms, visual management and andon displays all around them. Whilst we use electronic tools, we teach and encourage visual management to enable transparency and openness and to enable real-time discussions at the gemba with leadership and key stakeholders.  We are focused on creating flow efficiency through eliminating bottlenecks and impediments to deliver value faster to the customer.  This involves studying multi-team science, something we have partnered with the University of North Texas to study, and conducting many experiments to define the repeatable patterns in many contexts to enable agility across the organization.  We are currently working on a number of scholarly white papers for publication in the coming months to share this learning with the agile world.   A example of Multi Team Systems is Scrum of Scrums and Meta Scrum.  We define these as behavioral patterns, and it is through observing them we can identify what works and what struggles.  We can then experiment by adjusting the process and see the effect on the behavior.  As we refine these team interactions, we iterate and document them as patterns, both positive and negative. Another example is the idea of creating a SoSM (Scrum of Scrums Master) and making them accountable for the release of the joint team's effort.  We find that this creates a command and control leadership style, as we now have a single person ‘telling’ the teams to deliver.  This dampens the collaboration between teams as they are now being measured and held accountable by a proxy manager. We recognize that simply making a group of people use Scrum does not create a great team, and when we involve multiple teams we find the challenges are amplified.  Changing behaviors and teaching team skills is essential.   Cynefin enables us to understand complex adaptive systems, and teams are indeed complex with many unpredictable behaviors.  It’s important to understand that it is task interdependence that determines if you need a team, and not people in a reporting structure who are necessarily a team, despite what the organization chart might say.  If individuals need to work consistently with other individuals to deliver something, then we consider them interdependent and we form a team, irrespective of reporting lines.  Those people work interdependently, adaptively and dynamically towards a shared & valued goal.  Studying the work of David Snowden with the professors at UNT, we are starting to define behavioral markers that teams can self identify against and then self correct against, together with close coaching and support from the team’s Scrum Master. We are defining what agility means to Toyota as a global corporation. We have taken a lot of industry knowledge and we are giving back to the community by trying to find synergies between TPS/Lean and the agile world. We have recently launched a public offering called Scrum the Toyota Way, for example, and after successful beta tests we are now planning a wider public availability of this training.  We continue to learn new things and evolve as our understanding of this world deepens.

InfoQ: What have you learned?

Thurlow: We have learned that agility is hard, really hard. There is also no such thing as an agile transformation.  You fundamentally have to change your operating model, and undertake an organizational transformation to achieve the agility you desire.  Scrum is but one item in the toolbox to help you do this. You also need a sense of urgency. If the C Suite don’t see a compelling reason to change, chances are you’ll actually make things worse by messing with the current condition, and the resistance to change will be overwhelming, with no mandate to actually achieve that change. I’ve also realized that not everyone needs to be agile!  If you’re shipping concrete slabs you probably don’t need to do that in two-week sprints, as the need to change rapidly is not there.  Sure, Scrum will give you a planning cadence, but Scrum was intended to work in complex domains and with complex systems.  These are areas where a linear approach and fixed thinking are not effective.   If you are working in a domain that is fixed and varies little, then agility may not be as important as being Lean.  Optimizing the efficiency of product flow may be much more beneficial.  If however, you are working in a fast changing ever evolving market, then agility is crucial.  Remember, you can be lean and not agile, and you can be agile and not lean. I’d suggest that agility plus lean is a winning combination.  You could say that Agility is delivering the right thing, and Lean is delivering the thing right.

InfoQ: How successful is Scrum for you?

Thurlow: If you are a one team one product startup, Scrum is very simple to apply, and very effective.  If you put a group of highly talented individuals together in a room and provide the motivation and the challenge, they’ll create great things.  Scrum is highly effective at shortening the PDCA cycle and delivering rapid results, by enabling rapid response to change, a key agile tenet. Scale that to one team with many products and the product backlog becomes a team backlog. Prioritization now becomes much more challenging as many stakeholders vie for the number one spot.  Making that team backlog visible to leadership is critical to enable real-time discussion and prioritization.  And when I say visible, I mean on a physical board across a giant wall or a series of whiteboards stitched together.  This is precisely what we are doing at Toyota Connected. Scale that to many teams on the same product, and certain patterns become useful; patterns to enable higher level backlog and product management.  It’s here we start to use Meta Scrum for the management of backlog, as well as Scrum of Scrums for the management of delivery across multiple interdependent teams.  The coordination of multiple dependencies between teams and products is amplified and so the need to find pragmatic techniques to coordinate that collaboration is essential. When you scale that to many teams on many products, the complexity scales exponentially.  Now throw in numerous dependencies, and constraints, whether that’s multiple partners or vendors, or built in constraints within a global corporation, and agility becomes far more complex to achieve.  The concepts are the same, the tools are the same, but the context alters everything.  This is where organizational design and the operating model have to change and evolve.   We have clearly recognized that there is no one-size-fits-all scaling framework. Frameworks are context agnostic, but at scale context is everything.  Patterns, techniques, experiments, and empowered teamwork are all essential, but there is no silver bullet, not yet anyway.

InfoQ: How crucial is the role of product owner?

Thurlow: The product owner role is critical to the success of a Scrum team, but is also the most challenging to get right.  The Scrum Guide notion of the team doing the heavy lifting on creating the backlog is not workable in practice at scale. Developers do not always possess the skills or desire to be the owners of a product backlog, even if the PO is still accountable.  Being able to sell and market a product, as well as do the business analysis side of the role requires certain disciplines that are not plentiful in highly technical engineers, nor is it the best use of their skills and talents.  If that role does exist or evolves within the team, then the team effectively become a product owner anyway.  Of course, this depends on the way you define Product Ownership, and the bigger picture of Product Management. Various scaling approaches attempt to remedy this through various means, but we have come to realize that we need a clear product owner in that role, and that while the role is singularly accountable, the role of product ownership is an activity that involves many people.  A single team concept does not scale without adaptation and without immense discipline, and such discipline is hard to achieve in a large corporation. Through the study of the product owner role, we have realized that we needed to codify the actual work of creating the backlog.  Afterall, we need the backlog for the team to work on, and for the team to refine. Therefore we created an activity called Product Backlog Development. Product Backlog Development is the act of creating Product Backlog Items. This is an ongoing process in which the Product Owner together with any required stakeholders create Product Backlog Items. Required stakeholders may include; Customers, Subject Matter Experts, System Users, Business Representatives and support from any group necessary to help the Product Owner develop backlog items. During Product Backlog Development the product vision, strategy and roadmap are created, reviewed and revised. Product Backlog Development occurs every Sprint. It may seem simple, and probably others would argue not needed as the Scrum Guide defines this anyway, albeit less explicitly, but what we have found is that it does not define it well enough, so we simply did. We do of course promote and enable open and effective communication between the teams and the actual customers, but often we found that the product owner being actively engaged is more effective day-to-day, especially where we have time zones, language, and technological limitations.  We also use the chief product owner concept when we have many teams working on the same product.  The chief product owner enables effective communication between many teams and a customer, as well as working with other product owners to ensure everyone is aligned and focused on the highest priorities.

InfoQ: How does the C Suite fit into the agile world? 

Thurlow: Executive and senior leadership engagement is key once you start to scale the number of products, or the number of teams. At Toyota Connected we scale the role of product owner to the executive level and we conduct an Executive Meta Scrum monthly to review enterprise progress, ensure alignment to vision and strategy, and to make critical prioritization decisions.   We also have an Executive Action Team (EAT) where the same senior executives meet frequently to review impediments (blocking issues) and self assign them for resolution.  This means the EAT behaves like a Scrum team, pulling impediments from a backlog and executing work to resolve them.  In larger more complex multi vendor or multi affiliate product delivery, we may also have an intermediate Leadership Action Team (LAT) to resolve impediments or to take more rapid action before it is escalated to the EAT. If you don’t have this engagement, you will find the ability to change direction or priority quickly is diminished, and with it your agility and perhaps your competitiveness. Executive engagement is also needed to tackle the silos that exist in large companies and organizations. It’s a challenge to eliminate the silos that evolve and protect their existence. This makes value stream design long and painful, and as Peter Drucker once said, “any innovation in a corporation will stimulate the corporate immune system to create antibodies that destroy it.” To truly transform an organization we must optimize the system for the flow of value, and this means looking at the whole system, and changing the whole system, if that is what is needed.  We must stop doing agile and start enabling flow and shortening the feedback loops.  Then we will become agile.

InfoQ: Toyota is known for the Toyota Production System and Lean Production. How does Scrum and agile relate to this?

Thurlow: Scrum, the predominant agile framework, was based on the Toyota Production System (what many refer to as lean, a term coined by the authors of the book, “The Machine that Changed the World,” the first major publication on how Toyota manufactures products) and, as I was recently told by Ken Schwaber, on DuPont’s influence to adopt an empirical planning approach.  In fact, Scrum is simply an empirical planning approach, with rapid feedback loops built in to enable certain behavioral characteristics in a team.  It is PDCA codified with time boxed steps.  How long should planning, doing, checking and acting last? And what is actually happening in each of these phases? Scrum codified this, providing discipline around PDCA. TPS/Lean is the gold standard for lean product development.  Codifying PDCA using Scrum is providing a mechanism through which we can improve our responsiveness to change, and to constantly inspect and adapt the value we are delivering to our customers. However, agile isn’t saving lean and lean isn’t saving agile; the agile movement is enabling companies that are already lean or may wish to be lean to make decisions faster. We are using frameworks like Scrum and tools coming out of the Toyota Production System to enable business agility, thus developing the ability to respond more quickly to market trends. “Agility is not the goal. It’s a result or an outcome”. 

InfoQ: If InfoQ readers want to learn more about Scrum The Toyota Way, where can they go?

Thurlow: Right now we are testing a number of public classes. We have just held two beta classes and will be holding two more public classes, one in  Portland and one in Dallas.  We are also sponsoring  Agile Camp . The event in Dallas is in final preparation and will soon be announced on various social media platforms by Agile Camp. We also offer a 100% discount for our military veterans and serving members of law enforcement so they can attend and learn new skills for re-entry into the jobs market and help them serve the public more effectively.  

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What Really Makes Toyota’s Production System Resilient

• Willy C. Shih

“Just-in-time” only works as part of a comprehensive suite of strategies.

Toyota has fared better than many of its competitors in riding out the supply chain disruptions of recent years. But focusing on how Toyota had stockpiled semiconductors and the problems of other manufacturers, some observers jumped to the conclusion that the era of the vaunted Toyota Production System was over. Not the case, say Toyota executives. TPS is alive and well and is a key reason Toyota has outperformed rivals.

The supply chain disruptions triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic caused major headaches for manufacturers around the world. Nowhere was this felt more acutely than in the auto industry, which faced severe shortages of semiconductor chips and other components. This led many people to argue that just-in-time and lean production methods were dead and being superseded by “just-in-case” stocking of more inventory.

• Willy C. Shih is a Baker Foundation Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School.

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Corporate Culture: What Is Toyota Way? Report

Toyota’s culture, effects of ‘toyota way’ culture, challenges experienced in transforming toyota’s global culture, reference list.

For many years, Toyota’s corporate culture has ensured that there is teamwork among all employees in manufacturing its cars and car parts. This has made the company stand out from other motor vehicle industries. The company’s enacted values are comprised of five discrete components: teamwork, respect, and challenge, Kaizen, and genchi genbutsu. The company’s business process entails a continuous process of improving its products.

This is the kaizen value. This is a culture that has been entrenched in the blood of all staff working with the company. To ensure that they effectively solve problems affecting their customers, Toyota staff believes in going to the root of the problem and looking for a solution from there (McCuddy, 2010, p. 574). Decision on steps to take after identifying the problems is reached upon through a consensus by all staff.

Instead of taking challenges as a hindrance to their performance, the company’s staffs consider it as a wake-up call and a motivation to facilitate in enhancing their performance. The culture of teamwork in the company makes the staffs give the company’s matters a priority. This has led to them sharing ideas when addressing any problem affecting the company. As the company has a culture of respect for each other, they are always willing to listen to each person’s ideas and share knowledge.

Since its inception, the company has emphasized the culture of ensuring that it offers quality products to its customers. However, this has not been the case. The company has concentrated on incremental growth and forgot to ensure that it offers quality products. This was reflected by cases of the company being forced to recall some of its cars due to mechanical problems during their manufacture.

The success of any organization lies behind its organizational culture. Organizations with a strong positive organizational culture experience more growth than those that do not have. The ‘Toyota way’ culture has been instrumental in enhancing the company’s performance. The culture has brought together all employees within the company thus encouraging teamwork. It has been the reason behind the competitive advantage of the company. ‘Toyota way’ culture has led to the company experiencing significant incremental growth (McCuddy, 2010, p. 574).

Despite the culture helping the company experience incremental growth and gain a competitive advantage, it is the reason behind the company’s trend of lowering the quality of its products. Staff have concentrated on improving the company’s incremental growth and forgot to ensure that they offer quality products.

The global international culture of Toyota Company has helped it experience incremental growth. The company has been able to manufacture and sell a lot of cars every year. This has led to it being competitive. However, the inability of the company to produce quality products has led to the management embarking on shifting from global expansion to quality enhancement. In this undertaking, the company faces the challenge of losing its global market.

To focus on quality, the company has to cut down on the number of vehicles it manufactures (Nelson & Quick, 2009, pp. 123-136). This has negatively affected its global growth by reducing its market size. Its international growth strategy has led to the company losing its competitive advantage due to the production of low-quality products. In changing the company’s culture, it is experiencing the challenges of coming up with new methods of car production. The company also faces the challenge of having to recruit new staff or training its staff to deal with the new production methods.

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IvyPanda. (2022, June 28). Corporate Culture: What Is Toyota Way? https://ivypanda.com/essays/toyota-way-case-study/

"Corporate Culture: What Is Toyota Way?" IvyPanda , 28 June 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/toyota-way-case-study/.

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Corporate Culture: What Is Toyota Way?" June 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/toyota-way-case-study/.

1. IvyPanda . "Corporate Culture: What Is Toyota Way?" June 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/toyota-way-case-study/.

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• Zayed University's Kaizen Management Approach
• Kaizen Process Improvement Tool in Lean Management
• Costs Categories in Incremental Analysis
• Sustained Incremental Innovation
• Radical or Disruptive and Incremental Innovation
• The Incremental Cash Flow Evaluation
• Lean Production Techniques in the Service Sector
• The FCB Joburg and Toyota South Africa Marketing
• Effective Use of Non-Incremental Innovations
• GASCO Company Objectives and Analysis
• A.Wright on Employement in Google
• The Issue of Corporate Social Responsibility in Organizations
• Eastman Sports Cars Departments Communication
• Organizational Behavior. Open Systems Model
• Cold Stone Creamery Firm's Organizational Behavior

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Rainstorms impacts on water, sediment, and trace elements loads in an urbanized catchment within Moscow city: case study of summer 2020 and 2021

• Published: 07 December 2022
• Volume 151 , pages 871–889, ( 2023 )

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• Sergey Chalov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6937-7020 1 , 2 ,
• Vladimir Platonov 1 ,
• Oxana Erina 1 ,
• Vsevolod Moreido 1 , 3 ,
• Mikhail Samokhin 1 ,
• Dmitriy Sokolov 1 ,
• Maria Tereshina 1 ,
• Yulia Yarinich 1 &
• Nikolay Kasimov 1  

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In 2020 and 2021, the city of Moscow, Russia, has experienced two historical rainfall events that had caused major flooding of small rivers. Based on long-term observation datasets from the surrounding weather stations, regional mesoscale COSMO-CLM climate model results, and a detailed hydrological and water quality monitoring data, we performed a pioneer assessment of climate change and urbanization impact on flooding hazard and water quality of the urban Setun River as a case study. Statistically significant rise of some moderate ETCCDI climate change indices (R20mm and R95pTOT) was revealed for the 1966–2020 period, while no significant trends were observed for more extreme indices. The combined impact of climate change and increased urbanization is highly non-linear and results in as much as a fourfold increase in frequency of extreme floods and shift of water regime features which lead to formation of specific seasonal flow patterns. The rainstorm flood wave response time, involving infiltrated and hillslope-routed fraction of rainfall, is accounted as 6 to 11 h, which is more than twice as rapid as compared to the non-urbanized nearby catchments. Based on temporal trends before and after rainfall flood peak, four groups of dissolved chemicals were identified: soluble elements whose concentrations decrease with an increase in water discharge; mostly insoluble and well-sorted elements whose concentrations increase with discharge (Mn, Cs, Cd, Al); elements negatively related to water discharge during flood events (Li, B, Cr, As, Br and Sr); and a wide range of dissolved elements (Cu, Zn, Mo, Sn, Pb, Ba, La, Cs, U) which concentrations remain stable during rainfall floods. Our study identifies that lack of research focused on the combined impacts of climate change and urbanization on flooding and water quality in the Moscow urban area is a key problem in water management advances.

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Field studies were supported by Russian Science Foundation project 19–77-30004. The analytical experiments were done under Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russian Federation project 075–15-2021–574. COSMO-CLM model setup is a part of RFBR project 21–55-53039. The methodology of this study is developed under the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Lomonosov Moscow State University «Future Planet and Global Environmental Change» and Kazan Federal University Strategic Academic Leadership Program (“PRIORITY-2030”). The research is carried out using the equipment of the shared research facilities of HPC computing resources at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Streamflow patterns analysis was carried out under Governmental Order to Water Problems Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, subject no. FMWZ-2022–0003, project 3.7.

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Sergey Chalov, Vladimir Platonov, Oxana Erina, Vsevolod Moreido, Mikhail Samokhin, Dmitriy Sokolov, Maria Tereshina, Yulia Yarinich & Nikolay Kasimov

Kazan Federal University, Kremlevskaya St., 18, 420008, Kazan, Russia

Sergey Chalov

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Conceptualization, original draft preparation—Sergey Chalov; numerical experiments conducting and evaluation, precipitation data analysis, writing—Vladimir Platonov; the rainfall-runoff patterns analysis—Vsevolod Moreido; methodology, validation, writing—Oxana Erina, Dmitriy Sokolov, Maria Tereshina, Mikhail Samokhin; precipitation data preparation and visualization—Yulia Yarinich; review, editing—Nikolay Kasimov. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Chalov, S., Platonov, V., Erina, O. et al. Rainstorms impacts on water, sediment, and trace elements loads in an urbanized catchment within Moscow city: case study of summer 2020 and 2021. Theor Appl Climatol 151 , 871–889 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04298-9

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Received : 31 August 2022

Accepted : 23 November 2022

Published : 07 December 2022

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04298-9

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Moscow Practicalities: The Essential Guide

First thing we get asked is how to deal with cops. Really, it's not such a big deal: just show them you know your rights and you won't have any problems. Below we list more practical advice, such as consulate addresses, places to call home from, which city guides to read and so on...