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

Chapter 7. Toyota's Nerve System—A Human Version of the World Wide Web

By all accounts, Toyota is a big company. It sold over 9 million cars worldwide in 2007, posting revenues that exceeded $200 billion. It operates more than 50 manufacturing facilities outside Japan, sells vehicles in over 170 countries^[] and employs close to 300,000 people. ^[] Despite its enormous size and geographic spread, in culture, Toyota is still like a small-town company, where everybody knows everybody else's business.

Its top executives operate on the assumption that "everybody knows everything" because the culture of communication is open and personal. Information flows freely up and down the hierarchy and across functional and seniority levels, extending outside the organization to suppliers, customers, and dealers. Typical of traditional Eastern social and business practice, personal relationships are of primary importance. Consequently, Toyota's interconnected world in the digital age is primarily analog, based on the belief that e-mail cannot replace real, human communication in the flesh. This requires cultivation of the skill of listening intently to all opinions in an environment of free and open exchange and in face-to-face interaction. The result is an accumulation of relationships in an analog web that Executive Vice President Yoshimi Inaba calls the "nerve system," which, in many ways, outperforms even the most advanced computer.

Like the central nervous system in the human body, Toyota's ...