Prologue

Toyota as a Model in Light of a Period of Intense Challenges

This book is about making lean leaders, and it unabashedly uses Toyota as the model par excellence for lean leadership. We believe that the biggest gap in capabilities in the lean movement, and the root cause of the failure of many lean programs, is in leadership. As you’ll see through the course of the book, lean leadership is quite different from the typical leadership models and managerial styles of Western companies (American or European)—or, for that matter, of most Japanese companies.

When we started writing this book in early 2008, looking at Toyota as a shining example of consistently excellent leadership would have been entirely uncontroversial. The company had been profitable for more than 50 consecutive years and had risen from obscurity to be the largest motor vehicle manufacturer in the world. Moreover, for many organizations, the Toyota Way had become a blueprint and a guide to excellence. As 2009 ended, however, an outside observer couldn’t be blamed for wondering whether we should be looking at Toyota as a case study of failed leadership, not as a model to follow. As we were preparing this book for publication at the end of 2011, Toyota was still recovering from a third major blow in less than five years—the Japanese earthquake and tsunami—and had not recovered the “invincible” aura it had enjoyed back in 2007.