Toyota Culture
...of Human Resource Development & Management." It addresses the role of HR in a lean enterprise, explores a major crisis of trust at Toyota's plant in Georgetown, Ky., and how it responded by reorganizing the HR function.
By Jeffrey K. Liker and Michael Hoseus
Introduction
From the founding of Toyoda Loom Works in the 1920s to the creation of Toyota Motor Co. in the 1940s, its leaders believed that the key to success was investment in its people (Liker, 2004).
The Toyota culture has evolved since the company's founding and is the core competence of the company. It is the reason why operations are lean, cars hit the market on time and on budget, chief engineers developing cars deeply understand the customer, company executives anticipate long-term trends and have clear strategies, and every employee (called a team member) is vigorously working on achieving the annual plan of the company.
The Toyota Way is first and foremost about culture -- the way people think and behave is deeply rooted in the company philosophy and its principles (Liker, 2004). At the core it is about respect for people and continuous improvement and this has not changed since the company's founding.
Organizations of many kinds throughout the world have been borrowing specific methods from Toyota that have been turned into programs like lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, and lean six sigma.
Underlying these programs is a fundamentally different assumption than we see in Toyota's culture. The assumption of these lean programs is that the right tools applied to specific problems by expertly trained individuals will dramatically improve business performance in a relatively short period of time.
Toyota's underlying assumption is that carefully selected and developed people over long periods of time will continuously improve processes and ultimately lead to competitive advantage and mutual...
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