truth in each of these statements, Toyota has done a remarkable job of transferring
many key features of the Toyota culture in Japan to countries like America,
including:
◆ Teaching Americans to see and eliminate waste.
◆ Teaching practical problem solving the Toyota Way.
◆ Teaching the value of standardization as a foundation for kaizen.
◆ Teaching passion for customers and quality.
◆ Teaching the importance of teamwork.
◆ Teaching the value of people.458 THETOYOTAWAYFIELDBOOK
TRAP
Training Your Way to a New Culture
In Chapter 19 we described the “Company X Production System
Approach,” where X is your company name. This is often intended
as an enterprise wide approach to drive a common operating sys-
tem. It’s a noble idea, and one to which we subscribe. The problem
is when it’s viewed as a top-down way of driving culture change
through a staff organization. You cannot PowerPoint your way to
a new culture. All the slick multicolor slides and training packages
in the world will not change a culture. Simply “telling them” does
little good. People will get more aware of the words and concepts
that can help if there is a deeper cultural change through leader-
ship, direct experience, and the transfer of personnel to teach and
coach others into the new culture. But as a stand-alone process,
training and communications do not change what people truly
believe and feel and how they behave. We worked with one of our
clients to develop excellent model line pilots over a one-and-a-half-
year period developing strong local expertise in the process. When
they decided to deploy lean from the central office they did not
even promote those people involved but rather selected people
with no experience to be trained in a classroom and assume lean
leader roles. What a waste!Spreading Your Learning to Partners
If partners are truly extensions of the lean enterprise, then the culture must be
spread to partners. Let’s take the example of Denso discussed in Chapter 19.
Since Denso is one of Toyota's original keiretsusuppliers, partly owned by
Toyota, one would think they were always thoroughly steeped in TPS. Yet they