Toyota: An automaker wired to win

Visit any Toyota plant in Japan, and it's easy to grin at the Orwellian factory banners emblazoned with exhortations such as "good thinking means good products." Yet you will also see a high-tech ballet of a half dozen separate car models — from the Corolla compact to the youth-oriented models like the Scion xB — gliding along a single production line in any of a half-dozen colors. Overhead, car doors flow by on a conveyor belt that descends to floor level and drops off the right door in the correct color for each vehicle.

The same exacting efficiency and quality standards are expected at Toyota plants anywhere in the world. Toyota's best workers are trained by in-house quality gurus at their local plant — or flown off to Japan to learn the Toyota way of double- and-triple checking parts and processes for trouble and immediately signaling to superiors when things go wrong.

Above all, Toyota workers value frugality—whether it's turning down the heat at company-owned dormitories during working hours back in Japan, or spending weeks jawboning with suppliers to figure out ways to redesign a key component and shave another 10% from production costs.

Toyota is scarcely a flawless organization, and therefore not an untouchable one. Yet it has managed, so far, to avoid what Watanabe and others have called the "big-company disease"—and by that what they really mean (though will never say it) is the GM disease. "The scariest symptom," Watanabe said in an interview with BusinessWeek last month, "is that complacency will breed in the company. To be satisfied with becoming the top runner, and to become arrogant, is the path we must be most fearful of," he added.

If Toyota can manage to keep that sentiment in mind, it's going to be leading the global industry for a very long time to come.

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