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

by Emi Osono, Norihiko Shimizu, Hirotaka Takeuchi Narrated by Sean Pratt

Overview

To an outsider, Toyota is hard to understand. The company moves forward gradually while also advancing in big leaps. It is frugal with its resources while spending extravagantly on people and projects. It is both efficient and redundant; it cultivates an environment of stability and paranoia; it is hierarchical and bureaucratic, but encourages dissent; it demands that communication be simplified while building complex communication networks. These contradictions are rampant at Toyota because its culture and managers intentionally embrace contradiction, opposites, and paradox.

Granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of Toyota, the authors spent six years researching the company and performing more than 220 interviews with Toyota employees, distributors, and car dealers in order to determine what makes Toyota one of the world's best companies.

Extreme Toyota offers an inside look at the radical contradictions within the company, created by its own management, and how these help Toyota outperform its competition. By putting a premium on creativity and paradoxical thinking as a corporate resource, Toyota has become the best car manufacturer and one of the most successful companies on earth. This audiobook takes a fascinating inside look at what makes Toyota tick.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Authors Osono, Norihiko Shimizu, and Hirotaka Takeuchi-all business professors at Hitotsubashi University, Japan-here provide a detailed look at the principles underlying the long-term success of car giant Toyota. They begin by identifying Toyota's central "driving" forces-expansion, impossible goals, experimentation, local customization, integration, founders' philosophies, "nerve system," and "up-and-in human resource management"-and then use case studies of Lexus, Scion, Tundra, and other Toyota brands to show how the company's principles apply to day-to-day management and operations. The contradictory nature of the forces described-some focused on expansion, others on integration-form the framework for the authors' subsequent analysis of the company. A final chapter demonstrates the applicability of Toyota's approach to other types of businesses. Heavily footnoted and studded with graphs and charts, this insider's view of one of the world's leading manufacturers is somewhat academic in tone yet has enough anecdotes to make it interesting. Purchase for academic libraries with business or manufacturing/engineering programs.
—Susan Hurst

From the Publisher

"Heavily footed and studded with graphs and charts, this insider's view of one of the world's leading manufacturers is somewhat academic in tone yet has enough anecdotes to make it interesting." (Library Journal, May 15, 2008)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169999792
Publisher:	Ascent Audio
Publication date:	05/14/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

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