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…

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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…

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