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

Chapter 2. Six Opposing Forces That Drive the Company's Expansion—and Keep It from Breaking Apart

Deconstructing Toyota in the course of our research was like peeling back the layers of an onion but never reaching the center. The degree of contradiction and paradox was distracting as we looked for the fundamental reasons for Toyota's success.

The breakthrough came when we realized these paradoxes were central to our investigation. Very quickly, a larger pattern of expansion and integration began to emerge. We tracked this pattern through six case studies and in interviews with Toyota employees, distributors, and dealers across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Japan. Eventually we identified three expansive and three integrative forces unique to Toyota.

The expansive forces lead Toyota toward new challenges and greater diversity and complexity, whereas the integrative forces allow the company to weave together and internalize these experiences and perspectives and make sense of the complicated environment in which it operates (Figure 2.1). The six forces are as follows:

Expansive Forces

• Impossible goals: Toyota sets goals for itself that most would consider impossible to achieve, and it does this knowing full well that the means to achieve them may not yet exist.

  Figure 2.1. The Six Forces in Toyota.

  

• Experimentation: Toyota encourages a high level of experimentation and learning ...