Chet Richards

James Surowiecki recaps Toyota, again, in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker. As Surowiecki notes, this has all been said about 3,000 times, but how Toyota does it still has enough novelty value to rate a New Yorker piece in 2008.

Toyota’s innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That’s why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: it knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow.

The reason, as Surowiecki hints at, is the culture. They know we can’t — or won’t — adopt it, or something like Boyd’s FESA climate (the four German words) that produces a similar effect. As a manager of mine at Lockheed once put it, “It’s almost like they’re taunting us.”

This explains at least a part of why the airline business is in such trouble, which should be no mystery. About 20 years ago, Herb Kelleher, when asked if he was worried about the Southwest wannabes then being rolled out by Delta, United, and the other majors, pounded the desk and said that they can copy the use of just one type of aircraft, and they can copy no assigned seating, “but they can’t copy our culture!”

And here we are 20 years later.

[Update: Toyota missed analysts' estimates and only earned $3 billion in the quarter ending March 31, 2008.]