No Satisfaction at Toyota

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In the Works Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, assembly plant is its largest outside of Japan. It makes a half-million cars a year--one every 27 seconds.

Finish Line: A worker does final inspection. Toyota's assembly lines make thousands of changes a year to how the work is done.

Problems First

James Wiseman remembers the moment he realized that Toyota wasn't just another workplace but a different way of thinking about work. Before joining the company, he had been a factory manager, first for a swimsuit maker, then for a steel-tubing manufacturer. He joined Toyota's still-new Georgetown plant in October 1989 as manager of community relations. Today, he's vice president of corporate affairs for all of Toyota manufacturing in North America.

At the swimsuit factory and the tube factory, "there was always a lot of looking for the silver bullet," Wiseman says, "looking for the big, dramatic improvement. And I had the attitude that when you achieved something, you achieved it. You enjoyed it." He was steeped in the American business culture of not admitting, or even discussing, problems in settings like meetings.

In Wiseman's early days, Georgetown was run by Fujio Cho, now the chairman of Toyota worldwide. Every Friday, there was a senior staff meeting. "I started out going in there and reporting some of my little successes," says Wiseman. "One Friday, I gave a report of an activity we'd been doing"--planning the announcement of a plant expansion--"and I spoke very positively about it, I bragged a little. After two or three minutes, I sat down.

"And Mr. Cho kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, 'Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.'"

Wiseman says it was like a lightning bolt. "Even with projects that had been a general success, we would ask, 'What didn't go well so we can make it better?'" At Toyota, Wiseman says, "I have come to understand what they mean when I hear the phrase, 'Problems first.'"

It's another cliché that is powerful if you take it seriously: You can't solve problems unless you admit them. At Toyota, there is a presumption of imperfection. Perfection is a fine goal, but improvement is much more realistic, much more human. Not a 15% improvement by the end of the quarter, a 1% improvement by the end of the month.

The challenge, of course, is to make the rhetoric real, to make the presumption of imperfection integral to how people think and work. Pete Gritton knows better than most how that happens; he and his staff have hired all the Kentuckians who work at Toyota Georgetown. He's vice president of HR and administration for Georgetown, and vice president of HR for Toyota manufacturing in North America.

"We want people to be problem solvers," Gritton says. "Because every time there's a problem, we don't send out some guy in a white shirt with a clipboard." New hires--10% of job applicants make it through screening tests that include a team-building exercise--are immersed in Toyota's process for process improvement. There are daily work-group meetings, a written suggestion program, and longer-term problem-solving teams. But everything is grounded in two hard realities.

First, of course, "we have to make 2,000 cars a day. We can't vote about how to make each one," Gritton says. "We can't stop every few minutes and change the process." And then there is the most basic rule, the reason "continuous improvement" is not a matter of character or national culture or willpower, but is itself a kind of assembly line. "The rule here is that improving something starts after understanding the standard--understanding how we do it now," Gritton says. "If you don't understand what you're trying to improve, how do you know that your suggestion is an improvement?"

No one at Toyota Georgetown can talk about his work without explaining how it has just changed, or is about to change. Chris Gentry, a supervisor for instrument-panel assembly, is showing how his area is about to be redesigned. It was set up just this year to handle the 2007 Camry--but after working with it for most of a year, workers now see inefficiencies. Some work will be moved back to an area where kits are assembled; some movement of parts can be off-loaded to seven newly built transport robots. Two jobs will be eliminated and the workers redeployed elsewhere; 18 seconds can be shaved from the assembly process.

"We set it up for the model change," says Gentry. "Now we'll fix it. We standardized it, now we're improving it." It's not the instrument panel--it's the way you make the instrument panel.

In the 2007 Camry, there is a tiny change that drivers won't notice. The Camry's radiator support bar--a brace of steel running across the lower front of the engine compartment--isn't installed when the body is first made. It used to be, but it blocked access to the engine compartment. Workers had to stretch and lean in to install engine wiring and components. With the bar's installation held out until near the end of assembly, workers simply step into the engine compartment and get right up close to their work. That idea ricocheted from the plant floor in Georgetown, up to Toyota's design team, and then out to Camry assembly plants around the world.