The key ideas

The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence Through Leadership Development

Jeffrey Liker, Gary Convis, 2011

Companies around the world copy Toyota’s tools, but a year later the improvements slide back. Professor Jeffrey Liker and Gary Convis, who spent two decades at Toyota plants in the United States, explain what is missing: leaders who grow themselves and grow others. The book shows how such leaders come about and why they are needed most in a crisis.

Who it is for

For managers who are tired of deciding everything themselves, and for those who introduce improvements only to find a year later that everything has slipped back. And for anyone who wants to grow people, not just give them orders.

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

The wastebasket that flew out the window

The 1970s, a Ford plant. A young quality specialist, Gary Convis, is fighting a defect in the new Lincoln: an interior panel comes loose, and finished cars have to be taken apart. He warns that if the defect turns up again, he will stop the line, and a week later he does exactly that. The production head, in a rage, kicks the wastebasket, and it flies out the window. But the defect almost disappears, and Convis wins the argument.

It looks like bold leadership. But at Toyota, as Convis later learned, it would have been seen as a failure. The problem should have been solved by the workers in that area themselves, and management should have demanded this of every team, with no heroes.

Convis spent twenty years at NUMMI and Toyota, and together with Professor Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, he wrote a book about where Toyota’s leaders come from. Many companies copy the tools that lean production gave the world, that is, the system for fighting waste. The results can come fast, but then everything slides back. One Toyota master compared this to pulling weeds but leaving the roots. In the authors’ view, the roots here are the leaders.

Next you’ll see how Toyota grows managers and how this approach holds up in a crisis.

The four-hundred-dollar nutrunners nobody needed

Yuri Rodrigues came to Toyota already a star: at the BMW-Chrysler joint plant in Brazil he was seen as an expert in lean methods. Convis offered him a position several levels lower, and Yuri accepted, realizing he knew less than people thought.

At Toyota’s plant in Brazil, about 55 defective cars were waiting for repair. Yuri found the cause: bolts were being tightened with uneven force because the workers had simple nutrunners. He proposed buying smart ones that shut themselves off at the right torque. His mentor, Toyota veteran Rikio Iitaka, asked whether it was really worth buying such tools at 400 dollars apiece for the whole plant, and advised him to first watch how people worked.

Yuri began digging for the cause by asking “why”. It turned out that about 40 percent of the workers didn’t know the tool sounds different when a bolt is tightened correctly, and nobody did preventive maintenance on the tools themselves. Yuri trained the people, wrote the sound check into the standard work and set up planned maintenance. Five months later the area had a third as many defects, and tool maintenance had become six times cheaper.

This is what self-development looks like at Toyota. The authors write that the company considers it the main trait of a future leader: leadership can’t be taught, it can only be learned by someone who wants to learn it. But nobody grows alone. You need a sensei, a mentor who sets a hard challenge and doesn’t give a ready-made answer. It’s like learning the violin: you won’t become a virtuoso just by watching a master’s recording.

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About the author

Jeffrey Liker, professor of industrial engineering at the University of Michigan, is the author of the bestseller The Toyota Way. Gary Convis worked at NUMMI and Toyota for more than twenty years, became the first American president of Toyota’s Kentucky plant and later headed Dana, an auto parts supplier.

All books by this author: Jeffrey Liker, Gary Convis

Terms from the book

  • Ford
  • Lincoln
  • General Motors
  • Kentucky
  • Kaizen
  • Flynn
  • Toyota: A Japanese car company that grew out of the Toyoda family’s loom factory. Its approach to work and leadership became a model for many companies around the world.
  • NUMMI: A joint Toyota and General Motors plant in California, opened in 1984. Toyota’s first attempt to bring its culture to a large plant in the United States; Convis was its first general manager.
  • Lean production: An approach to work that grew out of the Toyota Production System: the company looks for and removes waste, that is, everything a customer would not pay for.
  • Rodrigues: Yuri Rodrigues, an engineer whom Convis brought to Toyota. His story in the book shows how a mentor grows a manager.
  • Nutrunners: Power tools that quickly tighten bolts and nuts. A simple one relies on the worker’s feel, a sophisticated one shuts itself off at the right torque.
  • Iitaka: Rikio Iitaka, a Toyota veteran with thirty years at the company and a disciple of Taiichi Ohno, creator of the company’s production system. He was Yuri Rodrigues’s mentor.
  • Sensei: Japanese for both master and teacher. At Toyota it means a mentor who sets hard challenges and asks questions instead of giving ready-made answers.
  • Okamoto: Seizo Okamoto, a Japanese welding expert and the sensei for the NUMMI body shop. He later became president of Toyota’s plant in Indiana.
  • Ito: Fumitaka Ito, president of NUMMI, who came from finance. He made engineers report on every long equipment breakdown.
  • Minomi: The Japanese word Toyota uses for moving parts without containers. The system was invented at the Central Motors plant, and the workers in Kentucky reinvented it.
  • Central Motors: A Toyota subsidiary in Japan with a small plant where the minomi system was first used.
  • Javid: Vahid Javid, an engineer at the Kentucky plant. He led the team of workers on the minomi project.
  • Dana: An American maker of parts for trucks and cars. In 2008 Convis became its CEO right after the company emerged from bankruptcy.
  • Bryant: Marty Bryant worked at Toyota’s Kentucky plant and then at a Toyota supplier. Convis brought him to Dana to lead improvement at its plants.
  • Fort Wayne: A city in Indiana that is home to one of Dana’s plants.

All terms

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