Behind Toyota's Success

BUSINESS BOOK REVIEW

In 'Managing to Learn,' the author distills lessons on Toyota's A3 management philosophy from decades working there.
By Alan Mitchell
December 15, 2008
In 1983, John Shook became the first Westerner to work for Toyota. His job was to help the Japanese carmaker transfer production to the U.S., which involved interpreting and explaining Toyota's legendary "lean" manufacturing to people who had never heard of it.

Although even Toyota cannot escape the effects of the current recession -- Fitch, the ratings firm, has just lowered its credit rating -- since the mid-1980s Toyota has overtaken Ford to become the second-biggest carmaker in the United States.

* Managing to Learn
Managing to Learn


Every gain in its market share has come at the expense of the Big Three -- Ford, GM and Chrysler -- and it is a real possibility that they will not survive this recession in their current form.

Toyota's rise generated a flood of books, starting in 1990 with "The Machine That Changed the World," about its many tools, techniques and practices, broadening recently to a growing interest in its approach to management.

Somehow, however, its secret of success has remained elusive. In "Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor, and Lead," Shook, now director of the Japan technology program at the University of Michigan, distills lessons from decades of experience with Toyota, which he tries to present in a way Westerners can not only understand but also apply.

Although written mainly for lean "converts" and published by a lean specialist, this may be the first book that actually helps outsiders connect the dots and get a glimpse into how Toyota ticks.

It does so, however, via an artificial and sometimes irritating device: an extended invented story about how a young middle manager and his boss set about tackling a problem with the translation of technical documents from Japanese to English.

Ostensibly, it is all about their application of a single Toyota management tool, "A3 decision-making," which forces managers to put on a single piece of paper everything anyone needs to know about a problem: why it matters, what is causing it, what we want to achieve, how to achieve it and how we will know we have been successful.

The book charts the young manager's journey. He starts out jumping to a conclusion and investing his ego in promoting and defending it, only to discover he is wrong.

Thanks to his boss' coaching, he realizes that his real contribution lies in researching the facts and letting them speak for themselves. He must leave ego behind to become a detective who gets to the root of the problem.

Then he must learn another lesson: how to build consensus around the answer and promote it to the rest of the organization.

As the story unfolds, Shook peels away Toyota's thinking and management philosophy layer by layer.

Western managers think their job is to get results. Toyota thinks the job of managers is to design and sustain processes that generate these results as a matter of course.

Western managers think they employ workers to do a job. Toyota employs workers to learn how to do the job better -- to keep improving that process, and therefore the results.

Western managers think management is about knowing the answers and telling other people what to do. Toyota disagrees again: If managers tell staff what to do, they take responsibility away.

The manager's job is to help staff learn problem-solving skills and work out what they need to do for themselves. Real organizational leadership is about doing both -- improving operations and developing people -- at the same time in such a way that they are mutually supporting.

As Shook shows, Toyota embeds the philosophy in day-to-day decision-making and management tools such as the A3 so that staff members have no choice but to learn it in a way they never forget.

"Managing to Learn" is not an easy read. The parable of the rookie manager's lessons from the experienced boss is not a scintillating story.

But if you persevere, the story style begins to work. The details of this story show how hard and painful it can be to practice this approach to management.

Bit by bit, however, they also build the reader's confidence that it can be done. For this reason, it is worthy of a much broader audience.

Alan Mitchell is a frequent contributor to the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.