The Toyota Way

It's get out and see where the work is done.

If you work in manufacturing, walk the floor, right? If you're familiar with the Toyota Way or Lean or, right, they all tell you go to the gemba.

Get out, see what the work is.

Okay.

You know, I'm sure, uh, you came from lean manufacturing.

I've read The Toyota Way and, um, the principles of Kaizen incremental improvement.

W- you know, you said that Elon taught... was complete opposite of everything you knew.

What, what was that like? What was, what was different about that?

I knew that this new Forge model was due to be released sometime in the fall, but Andrew and I discussed this after the recording had been stopped, and while he was hoping for a September release, in true Andrew fashion, he is postponing it slightly to tweak some components in order to deliver another quality product.

You will hear him allude to some of this in our conversation, and it will become clear to you later why I'm saying that he's fully embracing the Toyota Way mindset.

We cover a lot of ground and meander as we usually do, so I'm excited to share with you a typical phone chat with my friend Andrew.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

So I read a book.

I'm not all the way done it.

It's called The Toyota Way.

And Cody Gregory has been after me for a while to read this book.

It comes from one of the most studied organisations in the world and yet most leaders only ever scratch the surface of what it actually offers.

I am talking about the Toyota way.

First I will break down the core ideas that sit underneath the Toyota way so you understand what actually drives it.

Then I will bring that to life with a real example where this way of thinking shifted how a group understood a problem they had been stuck on.

After that, I will explore what this means for leadership in practice, particularly how you build capability rather than just chase outcomes.

That's Jeffrey Leiker,

a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and author of a book about Toyota management called The Toyota Way.

He says after Okuda took the reins in 1995, he launched a campaign to double down and sell even more cars in America, which other executives saw as risky given the mounting anti-Japanese sentiments.

But he did it in a clever way, by also expanding Toyota's manufacturing footprint in America.