Goal setting at Toyota

In manufacturing the Toyota Production System (TPS) is the benchmark that all others measure against. Many companies, engineers and academics have spend a lot of time examining how Toyota does what it does, and I’m no different.

There is a lot to be admired in Toyota and how they do things.  I spent a little time examining how Toyota moves forward and a very large part of the success of their product line may be the setting of tough goals. Just setting the goal and expending the necessary resources to make it happen is a small part of it, it’s allowing the people to own and take responsibility that makes their approach a little different.

Setting challenging or nearly unobtainable targets like “a full product line in every country” forces the company to look for new ways of doing things and break away from established routines.

The goals are purposely left rather vague, this allows organizations to explore different strategies. It can force groups to move outside their usual functional group and collaborate with others (both internally and externally) to find the beat solution as no “right solution” exists.

This teamwork has been always central to the TPS, on the functional level each member of the team is responsible for the sucsess of the team. Teams and the TPS see these obstacles not as problems, but as opportunities to be overcome and make the team and product better. Never settling for today and continually looking for incremental improvements to go along side the leaps in technology allows Toyota to make these big goals.

Toyota believes a car can contribute to a fulfilling a need , and by association making people happy. By wanting a full product line in every country Toyota links customer fulfillment directly to its employee’s endeavors.

Toyota says they don’t make cars, they enhance people’s lives. From my dealings with people from Toyota, employees really believe this to be true. It’s buried deep in the company DNA and is why they strive to be better tomorrow.

Other companies look at the TPS, transfer some methodology, empower people to own the process, but miss the part about making the customer happy being the most important part.