Book I read - The Toyota Way

Mainly because of interest to Agile SW development and Lean thinking, I read The Toyota Way -14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer from Jeffrey K. Liker. Like it says, it's a book about Toyota much praised manufacturing system.

Whole idea behind the book is to give an better view what makes Toyota manufacturing system such a good one. It introduces TPS (Toyota Production System), Kanban and lots of other systems they use.Still most importantly it tells about the importance of company culture, continuous learning and true understanding about the thinking behind TPS.

I've always been a big fan of thinking, "understand before you act" and that seems to be one of the key principles in Toyota also. Almost everywhere in this book it comes obvious that thorough understanding is the key to success. Hiding true problems behind quick win fixes is not profitable in the long run.

I really liked the book. It opens quite well the thinking behind TPS and the culture what they have there in Toyota. Of course it's just a tip of iceberg you understand based on one book, but at least I think it's the right ice berg to understand. Just trying to learn Kanban and Lean by how others are doing it, easily misses lot of very important aspects of the whole methodology.

I would recommend this book to all of you interested about Lean or TPS. Also those of you who see it beneficial to understand different kind companies, business models, manufacturing and company culture's.

The only small recommendation I would like to give to Dr Liker is, that maybe in the next edition there could be glossary, since there's so many terms flying around all the time, it's sometimes bit tricky to keep on track of all those.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen