Jeffrey Liker is a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Michigan and had studied Toyota for two decades when he wrote this book.
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Liker, an industrial engineering professor at Michigan, systematises into fourteen principles the management model that made Toyota the world's largest carmaker. His most valuable contribution is the distinction between the system's visible tools — kanban, jidoka, continuous improvement — and the philosophy sustaining them: thinking long term even at the cost of short-term financial results. The book documents why companies that copied the tools without the culture achieved gains that later reversed.
Jeffrey Liker is a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Michigan and had studied Toyota for two decades when he wrote this book. His contribution is organising into fourteen principles what until then had been transmitted as a scattered set of techniques, and above all separating two planes that management literature systematically conflated. On one side, the visible tools: kanban, jidoka, production levelling, continuous improvement, stopping the line at any defect. On the other, the philosophy sustaining them, captured in the first principle: base management decisions on a long-term vision, even at the expense of short-term financial goals. Liker documents with concrete cases why Western companies that imported the tools without that substrate achieved initial gains that later reversed: the system demands a relationship with suppliers, employment stability and a tolerance for training spend that most were unwilling to accept. The book is dense and at times repetitive, but it remains the best entry point to lean thinking for readers who do not come from process engineering.
For readers wanting to understand lean thinking beyond its tools; less suited if you want a quick implementation guide.
FactThe English original, «The Toyota Way», appeared in 2004; the Spanish edition from Gestión 2000 was translated and adapted by Lluís Cuatrecasas.
