John Shook
Former Toyota ManagerWHENJEFFLIKER ANDDAVIDMEIERasked me to write a foreword for this
fieldbook, I immediately and enthusiastically replied yes, but then had an
immediate and nagging feeling of concern. A “fieldbook” on the Toyota Way?
What exactly is a fieldbook, and how would it describe the Toyota Way? A
cookbook with recipes? A roadmap?
But what you the reader will find in these pages is no cookbook or roadmap,
but more of a compass to set direction and help you steer your own course. Your
guides Jeff and David are fellow travelers and well-equipped to help you, a fact
I know well. Somewhat coincidentally, I was on the ground with both Jeff and
David the first time they set foot on Gemba in Toyota City, though in quite dif-
ferent circumstances for each. I met Jeff Liker when I was still with Toyota and
Jeff was a professor at the University of Michigan continuing the research into
socio-technical systems that he had begun years earlier as a student at the
University of Massachusetts. I met David Meier in Toyota City when I was
introducing many new American employees of Toyota to the Toyota Production
System and he was there to began learning the Toyota Way the way you’re really
supposed to learn it—on the plant floor.
Jeff found Toyota through a formal education and subsequent research path
that combined equal interest and experience in the “soft side” of industry with
the “hard side.” As an industrial engineering major and co-op student at
Northeastern University, Jeff worked for General Foods Corporation, doing
industrial engineering work such as operations research, plant layout, and so
forth, but what came to interest him most was the Topeka dog food plant that
was organized around self-directed work teams using a socio-technical systems
(STS) approach—joint design of the social and technical systems. After getting
a Ph.D. in sociology at University of Massachusetts, Jeff joined the faculty of theForeword
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