Customer Reviews

Extreme Toyota: Radical Contradictions That Drive Success at the World's Best Manufacturer

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The authors contend that there is more to Toyota's success than its well-known Toyota Production system. They identify several contradictions to illustrate:

1)It cultivates frugality, AND spends big to develop people and projects.

2)Moves forward slowly and gradually, AND makes big leaps.

3)It is operationally efficient AND filled with redundancy.

How to make use of these points, however, is not made clear; for example, #3 is illustrated by Toyota having excess people in sales and meetings. The value of doing so, however, was not made clear.

The most interesting portion of the book involved a few relatively unknown facts. Toyota's dividend payouts are low, averaging 20% of earnings over the past ten years (Daimler-Chrysler = 47.5%.) The result is a cash hoard ($20 billion in 2007), and a mediocre ROIC. Average compensation for its top 33 executives is about 10% of Ford's. Finally, the founding Toyoda family owns just 2% of the firm, vs. Ford (40%), and BMW (50%). So much for several American common practices.

In light of the recent federal bailout, It doesn't take a brainiac to figure out that the Big Three American automakers are in big financial trouble. Each is plagued by a strikingly similar palette of problems, products and poor performance. In fact, one of the biggest gripes leveled against U.S. automakers is that they're too similar overall. That's not the case for Toyota which has turned divergence and internal paradox into a competitive advantage that has helped it consistently rank as one of the best manufacturers in the world. In the book Extreme Toyota a team of business strategy academicians focus on six contradictory forces that Toyota has replicated within its organizational DNA that enable it to constantly self renew and generate ongoing innovation. The authors applaud Toyota's ability to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable issues such as personnel redundancy with operational efficiency; extended experimentation cycles with rapid implementations; and constrained resource usage with extravagant project decisions. Soundview recommends this book because of its counterintuitive insights and powerful premise, which should benefit most manufacturers - perhaps even the Big Three.

Having read most of the detailed TPS books, this one was a bit to theoretical. Realize it was likely written for the MBA crowd....

I still find it a bit odd that Toyota subject books tend to avoid the fact that no company is perfect. Wouldn't trade the hectic workweek it sounds like the Japanese based staff work for anything. I liked the references to the CEO's push even thought business was good at the time.

First, this book is obviously dated int eh wake of Toyota's massive US recalls, though the trio of authors do hint at storm clouds on the horizon.

It's thin, even more than a bit thin, in that it's just 250 pages, if that, of main text, in what, 12-point font?

The concept is good. A trio of Japanese professors, at an English-language based Japanese business school, breaking down Toyota's success. But, it's like they needed a fourth person to edit and configure, and get them to dig deeper. That's the bland part.

I'm giving this three stars, but not an enthusiastic three stars. There's nothing "bad" about this book, there's just not a lot of anything about this book.

Vast numbers of books discuss Toyota, but this one is far more than just another paean to how well the company uses its production system. Emi Osono, Norihiko Shimizu and Hirotaka Takeuchi, working with translator John Kyle Dorton, focus on several different elements of Toyota's culture. They explain how the company's leaders diagnose its internal contradictions and use them as a source of energy and a springboard for creativity. Where most corporate leaders see waste and a sad absence of harmonization, Toyota's executives forge a fresh road through experimentation and continuous improvement. The book offers new ideas to help you assess your organization's internal contradictions and turn them to your advantage. Despite being originally written in Japanese, this volume reads well and it features illustrations that actually help you understand the concepts behind the words. getAbstract recommends it to businesspeople who are interested in Toyota, its culture and the culture of their own organizations.

Somebody may find my review title sarcastic. Pardon me. I am just being honest. Some messages and quotes were repeated in several chapters with incoherent style. Somehow the Japanese authors' access to Toyota's top management might have tied up their hands. The authors strongly advocated for the contradictory management philosophies of Toyota be its key success factor. However, little had been told of how such a culture can be sustained for decades, in particular on how employees can disagree with their superiors and move up the corporate ladders. In case you like to read to copy Toyota's success, "The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker" is a much better choice.