Toyota’s Improvement Thinking from the Inside: From Personal Transformation to Organizational Transformation

This book helps close the gap in how organizations think about and implement Toyota’s continuous improvement methods and management system. The Toyota Production System (TPS) is often viewed and adopted in organizations as a collection of tools to remove waste and streamline processes to provide products or services faster, better, or cheaper. While the tools for improvement and management routines are important, they are not where the true power of the system lies.

The author’s eight-year journey inside Toyota was full of experiences that developed the power for continuous improvement. These learnings are rarely if ever captured in books on Lean or taught in business and engineering classrooms. This book describes, in part, how Toyota, through its coaches and leaders, develops its members’ capabilities through a series of continuous improvement (kaizen and problem-solving) activities. For many members of Toyota, this process results in a personal transformation that ultimately leads to organizational transformation.

This book presents a model for organizational transformation that includes technical systems, organizational principles/values, and spirituality/mindset to achieve enduring high performance. This book shifts from the continuous improvement development way at Toyota to case studies illustrating the thinking and mindset to other organizations on their journey to transformation. It uses the TPS tools as an entry point for development and highlights the role that organizational values play in the pace of transformation. Several case studies are presented, including manufacturing (performance improvement of a production line), healthcare (improvement in neurosurgery patient flow), and education (improvement in standardized test scores).

The key benefit of this book is that it provides insights into Toyota’s culture and improvement thinking to help other organizations reach enduring high performance. The book is written for a wide audience so that readers outside of manufacturing organizations can understand the broad applicability of the Toyota way. In addition, It is written succinctly to help readers and practitioners focus their transformation efforts.

Sarah K. Womack, Ph.D., founded Womack Lean Advisors, a consulting firm focused on continuous improvement, operational excellence, and cultural transformation. She has over two decades of experience teaching and researching world-class management strategies for continuous improvement, including 8 years at Toyota’s Engineering and Manufacturing headquarters in North America. She studied under some of Toyota Japan’s leading experts in Toyota Production System thinking, kaizen, and problem-solving before teaching and leading workplace transformation in other organizations.