The Toyota Way

By Jeffrey K. Liker,

Book cover of The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

Book description

How to speed up business processes, improve quality, and cut costs in any industry



In factories around the world, Toyota consistently makes the highest-quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer, while using fewer man-hours, less on-hand inventory, and half the floor space of its competitors. The Toyota…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked The Toyota Way as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I spent my career leading software engineering at two of America’s top banks. It’s not all innovative work, as you might guess, and here is where Toyota comes in. 

Toyota teaches the difference between routine, standardized work (where we use predictive process control) and creative work (where we use adaptive process control). Balancing this in practice is a key to being a great software engineering leader. For those manufacturing-like processes (incremental feature addition, defect repair) the Toyota manufacturing way became the basis of the Agile movement a decade later: flow, pull, level work, quality the first time, process standardization and…

Want books like The Toyota Way?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like The Toyota Way.

Browse books like The Toyota Way

Book cover of Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People
Book cover of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier
Book cover of The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,187

readers submitted
so far, will you?

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in management, organizational culture, and software engineering?

Management 147 books