The Toyota Engagement Equation: How to Understand and Implement Continuous Improvement Thinking in Any Organization

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Aligning People and Purpose

Leaders at Toyota, as we have seen, play a key role in promoting a very special way of thinking throughout the organization. To many people, this will seem counterintuitive. Senior leaders, some would argue, should delegate culture to others, and instead spend their time trying to influence the “big picture” issues such as cost of sales, customer satisfaction, and market share.

One of the problems with that approach is that traditional indicators that we see in a company’s financials are lagging indicators. It’s mandatory to track and report these in terms of advising investors and government regulators, but as ...