5 Philosophies of the Toyota Way that are clearly visible in the brand today – Jalopnik

Let’s face it: 99% of business philosophies are just motivational posters. Probably created by the consulting firm they hired that year. They’re meaningless buzzwords like ‘The Four Disciplines of Execution’ or ‘Synergy’ – whatever that all means.

On a recent long flight, I picked up a book that had been on my shelf for a while. But ultimately, “The Toyota Way” had its time under the harsh reading light of a 737. This book describes the philosophies and ethos of Toyota. It is tangible in the way Toyota runs the company today, and can be seen in the way the company maintains success or even why its deepest failures became hard-taught lessons. It is cultural DNA built from within. That’s why Toyota builds cars that last for generations, why it’s still accused of dragging its feet on electric cars, and ironically why it keeps getting embroiled in scandals.

So, for better or worse, here are five parts of that philosophy that can be found throughout the brand today.

This is a big one. Let’s look at the big electric elephant in the room. While others were tripping over themselves in the EV gold rush and promising an electric lineup last Tuesday, Toyota looked like it was asleep at the wheel. But the reality was that Toyota was simply playing the long game.

Chairman Akio Toyoda has said, according to the Wall Street Journal, “There are many ways to climb the mountain of achieving carbon neutrality.” Toyota is so committed to this that it has an internal “1:6:90 rule.” This calculates that the battery materials for one long-range EV could instead make six plug-in hybrids or 90 regular hybrids. It’s a long-term bet that patience, resource management, and hybrid systems will win, despite short-term market hype. Recent sales results show that the company may have been onto something. Stick to your guns and let the fads pass.

This is a core part of the Toyota production line ethos. Toyota describes this as ‘automation with a human touch’, or jidoka – similar to Mazda’s methodology for applying that beautiful red paint. People are just as important to the process as the robots. Any employee can pull the Andon cord at any time to stop the line if they notice something is wrong, preventing a defect from moving downstream or, worse, to the customer.

This is not just a theory. It’s the reason Toyota’s factories are constantly bombarded with JD Power awards. In 2024, the Toyota factory in Canada won another Gold Quality Award for building the Lexus RX. Oh, and that’s the 22nd award for just that one factory. This philosophy builds quality into the production line, rather than inspecting it at the end.

“Kaizen” is a buzzword you’ve probably seen all over LinkedIn, usually by people who call themselves “growth hackers” or something similar. However, kaizen is legit. It’s all about learning through continuous improvement.

Toyota wasn’t hit as hard as other automakers by the chip shortages of 2020 – thanks to a masterclass in Kaizen. It wasn’t a lucky guess, it was a lesson learned from the 2011 Tōhoku disaster. As you can imagine, a large-scale earthquake and tsunami devastated logistics. That event destroyed the company’s supply chain, leaving plants dark for months.

Rather than thinking this was a one-time event, Toyota began putting a plan in place to identify critical parts (yes, including semiconductors) and build an inventory buffer as demand or supply changes. While other automakers were caught with their pants down, Toyota was sitting on a pile of chips, Scrooge McDuck style. It had already failed and learned from it.

This one is truly wild in the cutthroat automotive industry. Just ask General Motors how effectively a disgruntled supplier turns your production line into a ghost town. This is something that US automakers seem to be putting on the back burner, but in a hyper-competitive landscape, not treating your suppliers like disposable Pez dispensers is a welcome change.

Toyota’s philosophy views suppliers as long-term partners and not just disposable suppliers. Of course it can challenge them, but it also helps them. Toyota’s purchasing team will actually send its own engineers to a supplier’s factory to conduct joint workshops. This helps improve their processes and reduce costs, laying a foundation for a sustainable long-term relationship. In fact, when Toyota created the buffer inventories we mentioned earlier, it shared the financial burden of holding those inventories with its suppliers. Good luck getting your average bean counter to sign this off.

This is where it all comes together. The final pillar is problem solving, and it is based on two key ideas: genchi egnbutsu (see it for yourself) and hansei (relentless reflection). The most striking recent evidence of this philosophy? The certification scandals.

This has been happening for years: Toyota’s subsidiaries, Hino, have been falsifying emissions since 2003, and Daihatsu has been copying crash tests for 30 years. What about Toyota cheating engine tests? And admitting his testing violations. That’s rough, a complete failure of genchi genbutsu. “Management was unable to fully understand and keep track of the details of what was happening on the ground,” then-CEO Koji Sato admitted. AP. They didn’t go to look. The results were disastrous.

However, it’s not always about what happens, but how you deal with it. Rather than sweep this under the rug, Toyota has suspended shipments of all Daihatsu-developed models. It pulled the company’s Andon cord.

The reflection was public. Chairman Akio Toyoda apologized deeply and took personal responsibility as he put in place a plan to resolve the situation. This wasn’t a press release or a finger-pointing, like other automotive PR disasters. Compare it to the Firestone Tire recall of the early 2000s, when Ford and Firestone blamed each other as Explorers turned over at an alarming rate. The Toyota Way could not prevent the failure. But it set the playbook for recovery.

Ultimately, that “Toyota Way” book isn’t just for business types, even though there are some notable lessons we can learn. It’s the company’s source code. It’s a system that helps build indestructible Corollas. But if it is ignored, it creates the very scandals that Toyota needs to get out of. It is not a perfect philosophy; nothing is. But it’s a real one with a solid track record.