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

1.6. Embracing Contradictions as a Way of Life

So what accounts for Toyota's steady move to the top and now its ability also to leap forward as a global leader of the auto industry? Much has been made of the Toyota Production System (TPS), its logistics management, and its fast product development. But these systems or hard innovations do not fully account for Toyota's continuing success. Looking at the soft side of Toyota, we see rigid hierarchies and financial and human resource practices more often associated with inefficient global companies, making its success even more puzzling. Nevertheless, it is the soft side of Toyota that is more revealing of its core strength, and on closer examination, it offers a peek at a unique approach to organizational behavior in the era of the knowledge worker.

After six years of research and over 220 interviews, we have come to understand that it is the way Toyota combines the hard and soft sides that allows it to continue outperforming competitors. Both sides depend on each other to work. They are like two wheels on a shaft (Figure 1.1) that bear equal weight and together move the entity forward in the right direction. It is Toyota's relentless focus on the human being as the center of production and consumption that drives this company's continuing success. It is a model of the new global company that is also a mirror of human creativity—always growing and always incomplete.^[]

This brings us to the theoretical basis of this book, which is ...