Comments on: Toyota Wins Big: Think Evolution, Not Revolution

By: gianandrea facchini

gianandrea facchini — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 04:41:38 +0000

andrea, i see here two key concept:
- they are not slave of the quarterly frenzy
- they do not go through focus group but on field
both these concepts from time to time arise as significant limit to sounding strategic approach.
delivering good quartely result is a financial result, not industrial and not necessarily impacting on the long term company health.
on the other side, listening to customers or prospects at their work or life place is far better than stuck them in a room in an artificial environment and pose “routine” questions.

By: Andrea Learned

Andrea Learned — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:15:24 +0000

Paul – I recently read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and so keep finding totally un-food-related places to apply its lessons (It really is a sort of life-changing book, if any of you haven’t read it). One of its tales is about how a very integrated farm in Virginia has got all these systems for interconnecting the steps – taking a much longer term, process-oriented view of farming. One step that I remember offhand was that the farmer has his cattle graze on a certain field for a few days, and then moves them along – so a traveling road show of chickens can then come into that first field and eat the grubs from the dung among other things in the process of recycling fields over and over. All that stuff is process – the final delivery is the great beef and the eggs, etc. (I may not have all the details right, but it’s the general idea I’m getting at…)
Do you think the breakthroughs happen so slowly that we can’t necessarily point them out within a longer term process? Perhaps.. the slower evolution of process may not have as much to “announce” along the way because we won’t see marketing-changing events unless we look back a bit historically.
I need to go read the Toyota article you suggest.

By: Stephen Denny

Stephen Denny — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:04:02 +0000

Andrea:
You had me — I was with you completely — Toyota is a wonderful company that has done things well, makes a car with 10% of the problems of most US makers, and has the ability, therefore, to look over the horizon.
Good Japanese companies do this better than good US companies do. I was a Sony guy for many years and lived in Japan for a good bit of my formative youth.
Their Super Bowl ads? Real world benefits to monster users. Not flashy, but right on message.
Good for Toyota. I’m a fan. When you’re dealing with a culture that traces their current emperor back in a direct and unbroken lineage to Amaterasu, the Sun God, you’re dealing with a fairly long term culture.
So what does any of this have to do with “eve-olution” and how all the good things seem to have feminine traits? Is this the ‘cootie’ argument? This ain’t a boy/girl thing. You had me, but you lost me.

By: Paul Barsch

Paul Barsch — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:46:01 +0000

What we should really be paying attention to, as you rightly point out, is “the process”. Toyota has refined and redefined the process of making an automobile–taking it to a whole new level.
This manufacturer is a good example of the value of incrementalism, however I still think that it’s rare for incrementalism to lead to any break through or market changing event.
A good read on Toyota’s process focus can be found at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/111/open_no-satisfaction.html

By: Lewis Green

Lewis Green — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:38:38 +0000

Good post Andrea. I feel that American companies are too focused on short-term results.
Because of Wall Street, we must plan for the short-term bottom line. But when our primary focus is on the short-term intead of the long-term, we lose out to foreign competition. To change that, our primary focus needs to be on long-terms goals and objectives.