Go back to the history of Toyota and Sakichi Toyoda, the “King of Inventors”
in Japan. The company got its start as a producer of automation. Toyoda wanted
to automate weaving through power looms. But he did not go out and set up an
R&D lab to make the most high-tech, expensive, and exotic power loom possible.
He wanted a simple and inexpensive loom that could serve the purpose of reliev-
ing some of the burden on women in the community. He built the first Toyoda
looms by hand out of wood. He got his own hands dirty learning steam engine
technology.
When Toyota Motor Company got into the hybrid technology business, it
was not on a mission to become the world leader in advanced hybrid technology.
It began with a high-powered technical team, dubbed G21, assigned to think
innovatively about new ways to build cars and new ways to design cars for the
twenty-first century. In the early 1990s the financial success and market pene-
tration of Toyota was at a peak, yet chairman Eiji Toyoda took every opportu-
nity he could to preach crisis. At one Toyota board meeting he asked, “Should
we continue building cars as we have been doing? Can we survive in the twen-
ty-first century with the type of R&D that we are doing?” This triggered the G21
team to develop a concept for the twenty-first century car. A chief engineer was
assigned, and after an exhaustive search, and with prodding from new president
Hiroshi Okuda, concluded that the hybrid engine was a good intermediate
solution between conventional engines and the real future in fuel cells or some
other renewable resource. The hybrid engine was a practical solution to a real
problem—not a solution in search of a problem.
The history of Toyota has not been about avoiding new technology. It has
been about putting technology into a proper perspective, one driven by a practi-
cal purpose. And then Toyota always looks at the value-added process to realize
that purpose. Only then does the company consider where new technology fits
into achieving that purpose. This is the lesson of lean thinking about technology.
Like most other things we have been covering in this book, there is no cook-
book on how to evaluate technology or how to implement it in a “lean way.”
There is also no such thing as “lean technology.” There are only lean systems
with technology playing an appropriate role in supporting them. In this chap-
ter we will discuss ways to think about and adopt new technology.
Case Study: Is Toyota Technology Behind the Times?
Toyota has an interesting practice of allowing competitors to visit
their factories. The Georgetown plant often hosted “automotive
benchmarking” tours and has monthly “public information
tours/seminars.” Visitors were able to talk to Toyota employees and
ask specific questions related to how Toyota does things. On special
benchmarking tours visitors are allowed to visit the shop floor and
“see whatever they want to.”Chapter 9. Make Technology Fit 199