The Toyota Way
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
My father's bright idea was to give each C worker a workbench and train them in several jobs, then have them perform all those jobs in one phase of the assembly. That way, if a C worker got sick, because all of their colleagues knew all the jobs that worker had to do, the line would be held up much less.
Upper management passed on my dad's idea back then -- but it became all the rage in the 1980s when it was rediscovered in the Toyota model, part of the massive fad for "Japanese management techniques" that prevailed back then.
I keep this story in mind when I have to deal with agileshit at a company whose management had apparently never heard of The Mythical Man-Month.
In an industrial systems engineering class we learned of Deming who was trying to help American auto manufacturers with quality control and they wouldn't hear of it. He later was in Japan and influenced the ideas over there. Japan would go on to create the Deming Prize as one of their highest awards one could be given for quality
Somewhere there are Web developers adding real value. Sometimes I like to think I'm one of them. But that's not the LOB of the big players.
Excess capacity pooling decreases stopages but prevents signalling of problems back through the chain.
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry#Post_...
[3] https://twi-institute.org/training-within-industry/history/
>In the Foreword to Dinero's book "Training Within Industry", John Shook relates a story in which a Toyota trainer brought out an old copy of a TWI service manual to prove to him that American workers at NUMMI could be taught using the "Japanese" methods used at Toyota. Thus, TWI was the forerunner of what is today regarded as a Japanese creation.
One of the things mentioned was the concepts of muri and muda, related to (not) wasting (stuff), IIRC [1]. Related to Kaizen [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+word+muri+and+muda&
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muri_(Japanese_term)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term)
To be fair, that may be a purposeful design decision.
I consider the fact that the 4Runner can trace its way back to a 1980s Hilux that Top Gear dropped off a building (and still survived) to be nothing but good for its likely reliability.
Similarly, its primarily dial-based dashboard (as opposed to the touch-screen everywhere fad right now), truck-based suspension, and off-road performance (all things that could point to it being a rather much for a city car) to be its primary selling points.
Additionally, why change what sells so well? They sell ~140,000 4Runners a year, vs all of the Lexus models combined being ~40,000.
I can't comment on the Camry/Corolla as I've never owned one.
Having performed some cursory 'research' I found that in the USA in 2018, according to https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2018-full-year-usa-...
All Lexus vehicles combined sold 92,660 units versus the 4Runner model which sold 139,694 units.
A difference of 47,000 units, or roughly, the 2018 US sales for the Lexus ES
The first Lexus car ever was unveiled in the 1989 Detroit Auto Show, Toyota's first non-Japanese Lexus plant was in North America. In fact, Toyota stopped selling top-of-the-line cars after Lexus launched, they discontinued the Cressida and stretched the Camry into the Avalon just to have a full-sized Toyota in America.
Toyota didn't even sell Lexus cars in Japan until ~2006, the American Lexus vehicles were badged as Toyotas (e.g The LS400/LS430 was the 'Celsior'). Additionally, Japanese luxury tastes are different than American tastes - the Japanese Toyota Celsiors were available with a premium cloth interior and without sunroofs (which came standard on many American Lexus cars).
Now, Lexus may sell more in the Middle East than North America (by revenue if not units) but America was 100% the target market.
They also don’t change it very often.
The reputation existed before the show, that's where they got the idea.
Saw this:
Which makes a lot of sense when you consider how and where it's used. It's easier to have service and repair infrastructure for one car with identical mechanicals over a decade than 3 or 4.
Toyota cars are very successful, I don't know how do they react to a market change because AFAIK, they recently didn't have to.
See also Deming on quality control:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Work_in_Japa...
There also seems to be a running disagreement about whether Mr Toyoda or Taiichi Ohno is responsible for the Toyota system.
To wit, the intro to Ohno’s Wikipedia page:
made me chuckle - its not like he did anything of value...
Deming has always been a reminder to think about counter tendencies. He might not have made sense to the Detroit execs in 1950-1975 but his relevance changed sharply after that.
[0] https://www.leanblog.org/2016/06/gms-ceo-roger-smith-thought...
That's hilarious. Do you have a source for it?
Ben Rockwood, then at Joyent, gave the keynote at LISA '11 on DevOps that touches on Deming and quality (45m45s):
I suppose today Tesla with their over-the-air updates is redefining product dev-cycles..
Unintended acceleration flaw in Toyota models around 2005 to 2011, due to firmware bugs: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...
Great for USA customers. They were made whole.
I personally was driving a 2011 Toyota minivan in Thailand in 2013 when I suffered this firmware bug. Toyota refused to consider it was anything other than driver fault. I was only going 5kph when it happened so no damage, but damn scary as hell. No recall in that country, and unless dealers did a covert firmware upgrade during maintenance, the flaw still exists in similar model years.
US government estimates are that this happens an average of around 16k times per year in the USA. The press release that Wikipedia cites for that has disappeared but you can find it on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20180423205652/https://www.nhtsa...
Toyota's acknowledged problem was a floor mat that could get jammed and cause the accelerator to stick. However most of their cases of unintended acceleration were still likely to be human error.
There was (is?) a firmware issue that caused the vehicle to attempt to speed up, regardless of if the accelerator was pressed, or even if the brake was pressed.
In my case, I had the brake fully depressed with around 100kg of force, and the engine was revving to attempt to overcome the brake (VERY scary situation, believe me!). The system only recovered when I bumped a taxi in front of me.
Now you may say I was pushing the accelerator. If I did that I would have hit the car in front of me a lot faster than 5kph. If I was somehow pushing both the accelerator and the brake, the computer system should ignore the acceleration anyway (due to brake taking precedence).
But you don't have to take my word for it. Go read up on the Toyota firmware issue, starting with link I put in the prior post.
EDIT: here's another article, summarizing the faults as determined by court: https://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-kille...
- Toyota’s electronic throttle control system (ETCS) source code is of unreasonable quality.
- Toyota’s source code is defective and contains bugs, including bugs that can cause unintended acceleration (UA).
- Code-quality metrics predict presence of additional bugs.
- Toyota’s fail safes are defective and inadequate (referring to them as a “house of cards” safety architecture).
- Misbehaviors of Toyota’s ETCS are a cause of UA.
But, if you own a reasonably modern vehicle, try it :)
(On the other hand my 2017 Subaru Forester does not do the same; thankfully it has less of a tendency to roll backwards when releasing the brake on a steep hill.)
Second, Toyota dragged its feet on the full variety of problems that they had. But the one that they first acknowledged was the floor mat. As https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-pay-12b-hiding-deadly-... says, At the time of the first ABC News report, Toyota attempted to assure its drivers that the incidents of sudden acceleration without warning were solely caused by floor mats becoming stuck on the gas pedals or driver error.
No, it wasn't. An engine's speed (RPM / "revs") is directly proportional to the drivetrain speed -- the RPMs literally cannot increase unless you are 1) accelerating (actual drivetrain speed going up), 2) shift to a lower gear then slip torque converter to rev match (I assume you're driving automatic), or 3) disengaged from the drivetrain (in neutral gear) and hitting the gas.
There's no way for an engine to be "revving" to overcome braking. Hop in a manual car, get up to a normal speed in any gear, then try hitting both the brake and gas.
But Toyota's software did cause acceleration even without pushing the accelerator, and even while pressing the brake. They were legally proven to be at fault for that.
You can speculate all you want if I was being an idiot and mis-remembering what I personally did, but these facts still stand regardless of my personal experience:
1) Toyota was legally at fault for software caused unintended acceleration in the USA
2) Toyota Thailand never issued a recall for similar makes/years
Now maybe the software of cars sold in Thailand is totally different from the software of cars sold in the USA, but the cynic in me thinks it's just that Thailand's lack of consumer protections, plus Toyota's indifference, is the real reason no action was taken.
You can try a similar experiment to the one you proposed in a car with an automatic transmission. Stand firmly on the brake (with the parking brake engaged and nothing in front of the car, for safety), put the car in drive, and give it some gas with your other foot. You can easily get the engine to more than twice the idle speed without the wheels turning at all! (Don't do this for extended periods. It makes the torque converter get hot.)
But that doesn't apply when the car is already in gear and in motion. In both an auto and a manual, if you're applying enough brake to prevent the car from accelerating, the engine will never be "revving" to fight your braking. It will only increase speed if your drivetrain speed increases.
I didn't explicitly state it in the above post because I don't want to crap on the parent too much, but the if he was hitting a pedal and the engine was "revving"... he was probably hitting the gas and accelerating.
...Or the car was actuating the throttle as if he was hitting the gas, a.k.a. unintended acceleration.
I see a lot of people like you in this thread and elsewhere dismissing unintended acceleration experiences.
Before you continue to do so, I would urge you to read the NASA report on the Toyota unintended acceleration case and related documents (https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nvs/pdf/NASA-UA_report.pdf, https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_..., and the link in the top level comment, https://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-kille...). It lays out a damning indictment of Toyota's ECU hardware and firmware development culture, that flies directly counter to the happy picture promoted by the "Toyota Way" PR. Toyota never acknowledged the mistakes they made - instead they quietly sacked the head of that division and then most of the staff, and rebuilt it from the ground up. Today's Toyota ECUs appear to be designed quite differently.
see https://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-kille...
I also remember reading another report that mentioned that software engineering was regarded as 2nd class discipline to hardware in many Japanese companies, and that resulted in sloppiness, lack of oversight and rigorous testing at that time. This problem was partially mitigated by placing SW R&D in other countries, where it was easier to attract talent.
Lean methodology is focused on quality on multiple layers, however, as you mentioned, the implementation may not fulfil the spec.
(of course it could be that when they started down that path, it was not clear that battery electric vehicles were practical either)
[1] https://blog.deming.org/2016/10/toyotas-management-history/
It seems like Six Sigma is all anyone talks about in terms of management philosophy these days...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Deming/
There is a really fun to read a trilogy by Michael Ballé, the first book is called "The Gold Mine".
And from Goldratt, all of his books and videos and related material is also a favorite. Specifically, about Toyota, Eli Goldratt wrote an article that provides the historical context and what problems Toyota solved, and then continue to improve upon that solution to invent a new solution that is even more amazing. Highly recommended 10m read for free here https://www.goldrattconsulting.com/webfiles/fck/files/Standi...
I heard culturally Japan and to an extent other Asian manufacturing nations would never actually press the button. Can anyone confirm this?
More than that, when the manager approaches the employee who stopped the line, she is not supposed to ask, "why did you stop the line?" She instead asks, "how can I help?"
Its a cord, not a button, and the cord gets pulled all the time. It is a bit brave of Toyota to admit this fact when today's "journalists" are always looking for an angle to take a quote out of context and clickbait the headline. "Toyota admits they have constant flaws in their manufacturing process"
https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/toyota-quality-c...
https://www.leanblog.org/2012/11/andon-cords-at-the-toyota-t...
"In our introductory discussions about Japanese culture, Brad talked about the importance of harmony (“Big Harmony”) in Japanese culture. Because of the overwhelming need for harmony, people often wouldn't naturally speak up. They might be more willing to cover up a problem than to really fix it. So, the andon cord is a mechanism that makes it easier for people to speak up."
It's a an employee's duty to bring any abnormality to their superior, and then let them make a decision.
Sometimes something anomalous to a newer employee is actually normal, and an experienced superior knows about.
But sometimes letting an anomaly by doesn't get caught to later, since people further down the line/process aren't looking for or see them. And it's not until the product/process reaches final testing that they become aware. Thus it being cheaper to have stopped the line sooner. And 'punishment' being more severe than simply reporting a mistake or anomaly in the first place.
Also really good: Deming wrote his perspective in "Out of Crisis" and Toyota's Taiichi Ohno wrote about his experience in "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production". As others have mentioned, Deming laid the ground work for this type of thinking in post-war Japan. Taiichi Ohno led the initial development of the Toyota Production System.
The way the stock market is designed (and the fact that stockholders often get to appoint the board who gets to appoint the CEO) means they're going to put short term profits over long term viability. Many companies have been ruined and continue to be ruined by this short-term-ism chase for quarterly and yearly profits.
For example look at the field of Customer Retentions. It used to be focused on satisfaction & delight which are both long term success strategies (both to grow and to retain), but in the last twenty years Customer Switching (i.e. making it harder/more costly/more time consuming/more stressful/etc to switch) has become the norm, this is a short term strategy since it improves short term retention metrics at the cost of long term returning customers and poor word of mouth (i.e. nobody returns or joins after they leave, if you made the switching process hellish). It is a great way to keep your quarterly and yearly churn low, but a poor way to run a business.
It used to only be businesses with artificial monopolies that would do this (e.g. Verizon, Comcast, etc). But recently we've seen companies in fairly competitive spaces adopted a similar short term "suicide strategy" like LogMeIn (Remote Support Software), The New York Times (News Publication), SiriusXM (streaming audio), etc. All of which are likely chasing quarterly performance metrics tied to executive compensation.
Maybe that's naive and they're just saying one thing and doing another.
No company ever tries to go out of business, ergo they optimize to exist forever or get acquired. Whether the board & management understands how best to achieve that long-term sustainability is another matter and one that shareholders get to vote on.
Why does it seem to always be that way, though? Most every company I see appears very shortsighted with no thought to the long game.
Owners (shareholders) and boards are not full of idiots either. They realize the temptation of short term pumps. Thus, executive compensation is typically shaped to encourage longer-term thinking (e.g. stock that does not fully vest for years, bonuses based on future company performance years out, etc). And if they do reward short-term metrics, it's for a specific reason.
That said, japanese companies tend to have longer time horizons than american companies (decades vs years) and perhaps that's better. But then again, the further out you go, the less your planning will work out. So who knows for sure?
Yep. Arguably an over-fixation on "short term profits at all costs" would be a gross violation of one's fiduciary duty if it puts the long-term viability of the enterprise at risk.
One is to have dual class share structures where minority owners have majority of the voting shares (e.g. Facebook, Google). Another is to create a new type of stock exchange that incentivizes long-term ownership (e.g. LTSE long-term stock exchange).
> The way the stock market is designed (and the fact that stockholders often get to appoint the board who gets to appoint the CEO) means they're going to put short term profits over long term viability.
Easy: Don't do that. Either 1.) Don't be a publicly traded company, or 2.) Don't let short-sighted shareholders dictate your management decisions.
Toyota group is keiretsu where Toyouta Motor Corp. has owners like Toyota Indutries, Denso and some big Japanese banks and insurance companies.
You say "ruined", I say "fulfilled their ultimate purpose as disposable wealth-extraction machines enriching executives".
I totally agree that the stock market's design encourages short-termism. But this is entirely appropriate in service of the idea that heroic individuals are chiefly responsible for company outcomes.
(And in more modern views maybe you should worry about the other stakeholders too.)
Since we believe that executives are the ones creating the wealth, it is just that the wealth flows out of the company and towards them. Executives giveth and executives taketh away.
I wonder how many people actually believe that.
Most shares in most companies I've seen have been owned or controlled by executives or by institutional investors (mutual funds, insurance cos., pensions) that tend to vote with executives' recommendations. Without high-level executive support, shareholders are free to do whatever they want, but the important ones typically don't want.
Passive shareholders, well, don't participate on decision making.
Expect this feature to get worse with increased share of index funds. But not by much, because most people never were active anyway.
How so? Index funds buy when the shares are high and sell when they're low.
That's not true, fund managers vote on behalf of those shareholders, and not always go along with the board's position. See for example Vanguard's voting record: https://about.vanguard.com/investment-stewardship/how-our-fu...
Most shareholders (37%) are retirement accounts which have long term goals.
"Companies exist to maximize shareholder value" is the myth that just won't die.
Doesn't matter if the stock holders who pushed for the decisions managed to flip their stocks when they were still rising in value. Aren't most stock holders playing this game to flip stocks, without caring much about the particular company they're making money off?
[0]: https://qz.com/1623418/index-funds-now-account-for-half-the-...
It's simple: be Japanese and not American. Japanese companies don't have this kind of problem, precisely because they aren't American and their society doesn't value enriching executives over all else, and instead values a stable and harmonious society.
Not a single Japanese company, while the lists are dominated by the US ones. What you're saying is nothing other than the ancient TV trope about the difference between Japanese and the Americans (east vs west).
disclaimer: I have 0 ties whatsoever to the US.
1) Never ever go public.
2) Never ever accept VC money.
Problem is, you'll likely get outcompeted by companies that do either or both of these things.
That's a myth. Yes CNBC loves short term stuff as it makes good TV. In the real world see Black Rock (biggest asset manager) CEO public urging long term focus https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry... . See also Amazon and all the other profitless companies just listed as good examples that long term has value.
That's a pretty poorly explored position.
I said that CEO undercuts your point. You claimed short-term-ism was a "myth," then quoted a CEO saying that a lot of people focus on short term investing, rather than long term investing. Therefore making it not a myth, according to your own source.
When ownership is concentrated, decisions can be made based on long-term ideology. When ownership is highly distributed, and especially when indirect via indices, decisions are made in favour of widely accepted and broadly applicable metrics of performance, which tend to have only short term confidence.
Short term stock prices aren't entirely controlled by short term results. Just look at PE ratios for growth companies. Short term results often change the price a lot because its an indicator for future results. Stuff like one time write offs don't really affect the price.
Toyota has been publicly traded for 70 years and their shareholders (which are primarily other large Japanese conglomerates) have never even tried to make these kinds of short-term-over-long-term pushes and keep electing Toyoda family members into the top leadership positions.
Toyota might not have chase short term profits like many American companies choose to do. After two hours of googling it (and reading english web pages only, not japanese webpages), the only notable thing I discovered was that Toyota pays out 30% of its profits in the form of dividends and spends 20% of its profits on share buybacks for a total shareholder return of roughly 50% of earnings each year. This indicates that Toyota is shareholder friendly but it's not clear if this is an obligation or a choice.
Instead of chasing short-term profits, I've observed that Toyota spends fair budget on advertising and showboating futuristic looking hype technology that is never intended to be released or used. Some investors primarily look at the daily news and are satisfied with this strategy. The technology Toyota intends on using isn't hyped up; it's kept a secret until it's actually released to drivers.
Finally 90% of Toyota Corporate Employees in the Plano, TX US Headquarters are contractors from other companies. Those ones sure as hell aren't getting any quarterly performance bonuses or any executive compensation. At best, the executives bonuses are getting to keep your air-conditioned job for another 3 years.
However, the core tenets were valid from a general approach. My fear when reading was the potential to go overboard. We have all met over-zealous scrum masters. Same could be applied to a lot of the stuff they were essentially transferring from manufacturing to development and more specifically devops.
Then when it wrapped up very nicely I felt like I was bad at my job. "Wait, how did they fix it so fast!?!" (hyperbole here but it was sort of a gut punch)
For example books by Bob Sproull and books by Bruce Nelson.
Actually, the full title of "The Goal" is "The Goal: A Process of ongoing Improvement". Goldratt used to call it POOGI.
The thing about the manufacturing processes that have come out of Toyota (and others), or the ideas from Deming, Goldratt, and others, is that they're more about general systems theory. What is the flow through the system? How do we know when is an appropriate time to do X? How do we know the focus should be on improving the sales team and not the development team or vice versa?
It may seem like a focus on a manufacturing is misplaced, but many of the ideas transfers over to services as well. Within your business, you have processes which are repeated regularly, information flows with bottlenecks. Which of those should you focus on improving? How do you determine that? How do you measure the improvement efforts? How do you choose how to improve something (top-down directive, or bottom-up participatory effort)? Study Lean, Theory of Constraints, and systems theory and you'll get some answers and ideas.
I am tired of having a textbook thrown at me every time I ask a human question and treated like a factory floor worker by human automata and recent grads suffering from impostor syndrome
I know there is more to software than bottlenecks and efficiencies and all that tripe it seems quality and quantity are the only measures may as well go back to East Germany where all this bullshit emanates from in the first place
Even the damned ranking system on hacker news is an echo to the system used in North Korea. Software has become a breeding ground of groupthink and it's this kind of crap that fuels it
Are you seriously telling me Toyota is a better software company than Nintendo?
Deming and Software Development
https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2014/03/17/deming-and-software-development/
https://blog.deming.org/2013/07/whats-deming-got-to-do-with-agile-software-development-and-kanban/In any case, Toyota / Lean / etc. is a mindset that has a lot of really good ideas embedded in it. I'm sure you can take it and distort it and come up with a monstrosity (like people do with "Agile") but the core stuff is really good.
As noted by lemax, The Machine That Changed The World is a really good book on this topic.
It's also interesting to note that a lot of the "Toyota" system was inspired by the teachings of an American, W. Edwards Deming. If I recall the story correctly, Deming was pushing these ideas on statistical process control, and nobody in America would listen to him, so he want to Japan and they embraced his stuff, ran with it, and it helped them become a manufacturing juggernaut.
Anyway, I've seen more than a few people jump to the conclusion that it stands for something to do with the "Toyota Production System" which is unfortunate.
How do you double output to 500,000 cars a year? “Easy,” you say, “just make that line run faster.”
I knew I was onto something.
I was listening to the "The Rocky Road to Dublin" when reading your comment during the "hunt the hare" part.
Funny coincidence.
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons—until it was too late.
So I don't think it's fair to say that any of the ideas are outright stolen (I know you didn't say that either), because Toyota took them well past the starting point.
Or the movement could be made useful by having me (or the movement mechanism) carry something both ways.
Top Gear did an episode [0] trying to destroy a Toyota Hilux (similar to the Land Cruiser) and literally couldn't, which explains why it's so popular with terrorists. It's a worthwhile watch if you want to see truck survive after being drowned in water, fire, and the rubble of a demolished skyscraper. Say what you want about Toyotas, but that's quite the engineering feat in my opinion!
https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-officials-isis-toyot...
I'd also applaud the efforts of the mechanics who worked on this episode, it was great entertainment if nothing else!
Agile IS the Toyota way... Or at least tries to be
And focussing on long-term growth and stability is probably one of the main aspects of the German "Mittelstand" (medium companies, often led by families over generations) which usually has a strong focus on providing a sustainable place to work and therefore not optimizes its business for shareholder value.
Of course, you can’t minimize the different financial environments Japan and US have for manufacturers...