Cambridge Business Association
Extreme Toyota
Book

Extreme Toyota

Radical Contradictions That Drive Success at the World's Best Manufacturer

Emi Osono, Norihiko Shimizu and Hirotaka Takeuchi
Wiley, 2008
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Recommendation

Vast numbers of books discuss Toyota, but this one is more than just another paean to how well the firm uses its production system. Emi Osono, Norihiko Shimizu and Hirotaka Takeuchi, working with translator John Kyle Dorton, focus on several different elements of Toyota’s culture. They explain how the company’s leaders diagnose its internal contradictions and use them as a source of energy and a springboard for creativity. Where most corporate leaders see waste and a sad absence of harmonization, Toyota’s executives forge a fresh road through experimentation and continuous improvement. The book offers new ideas to help you assess your organization’s internal contradictions and turn them to your advantage. Despite being originally written in Japanese, and despite the firm’s recalls and woes, this volume reads well and features illustrations that help you understand the concepts behind the words. getAbstract recommends it to businesspeople who are curious about Toyota, its culture and the culture of their own organizations.

Summary

Toyota: Pushing Beyond the Boundaries

Almost all companies, especially large ones, wrestle with internal contradictions, opposing objectives, and paradoxes in operations and culture. The difference between Toyota and nearly all other firms is that its leaders embrace these complexities and consciously exploit their energy to drive improvement. Most companies try to decide which opposite force is better and then push to eliminate the lesser force. For example, traditionally, the design of luxury cars focused on either power or fuel efficiency. Toyota’s management challenged its Lexus design team to incorporate both. Rather than rejecting these manifestly opposing goals, the team used them to achieve something beyond any other luxury car. As a result, they created a powerful brand. Toyota’s executives consciously use contradictions to create challenges that employees must overcome to attain higher goals, surpass conventional expectations and reach for performance levels previously considered impossible.

If you dig into Toyota layer by layer in search of the core of its success, you will learn that Toyota’s leaders call upon a mix of “expansive forces” to foster its ...

About the Authors

Hirotaka Takeuchi is a graduate of the University of California at Berkley and co-author with Michael Porter of Can Japan Compete? Emi Osono is a graduate of George Washington University. Norihiko Shimizu is a graduate of Stanford. They all teach at the top-rated Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy.

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