Press Room

Crucial kata, revealed at last: The driving force behind Toyota's success,
with core secrets for putting performance in the fast lane

"In TOYOTA KATA, Mike Rother has put his finger on the heart of the coaching process at Toyota. Much of Toyota's success is rooted in these subtle yet powerful behaviors Mike so clearly describes. Essential reading for any company committed to lasting culture change." Bill Costantino, W3 Group, Former Group Leader, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc.

Few management teams hold the caliber of respect enjoyed by Toyota's. And in the world of management research, Mike Rother has garnered equally high-caliber admiration. Now this peerless corporation and a respected author are united, with groundbreaking results, in TOYOTA KATA: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Super Results (McGraw-Hill; Hardcover; ISBN: 978-0-07-163523-3; $29.95; On Sale September 4, 2009).

Unveiling the results of Rother's intensive, empirical six-year study of the employee-management routines that set the inimitable automaker apart, this insider's tour reveals the company's essential organizational routines, or kata (meaning pattern or form, translated literally from the Japanese as "way of doing things"). Business writers have published broad surveys of Toyota's overall management concepts, but Rother is the first to probe the kata, exposing the details of how the company applies those renowned success strategies on a daily basis. Organized around Toyota's primary approaches to thinking and acting, TOYOTA KATA delivers proven habits, and how to develop them, that can help any manager accelerate their team. Features include:

• Improvement Kata: Change is the constant. Toyota has internal capability to constantly establish challenging new target conditions, and regimens for overcoming obstacles diligently and learning from each one that is encountered.

• Coaching Kata: At Toyota, leaders are teachers. Rother shows how the company's core behavior patterns are taught to everyone inside the organization. Without a routine of teaching all employees at every level, motivation lags, capability is not developed, and missed opportunities for ingenuity abound.

• Why improvement and adaptation should be part of every employee's day-to-day work life, not rare occurrences that automatically meet with resistance.

• How to tap the true capabilities of everyone in the organization, spurring continual achievement of new levels of performance

• An enabled organization: the key to improving, adapting, innovating, and satisfying customers, and a strong strategy for an unpredictable marketplace

• Surprising traits of companies that thrive long-term, with numerous practical examples that bring to life these powerful philosophies and inspire readers to take action

• Practical applications and clear explanations for introducing the kata, with step-by-step methods for analyzing a production process and establishing a target condition

• Wisdom for a broad spectrum of personnel, not just executives and managers, but engineers and analysts, rising stars and new hires with high aspirations, instructors and their students

• Replication: techniques for effecting sweeping change in the fundamental psychology - the mindest or culture - of any organization, with advice for adapting Toyota's management method to a variety of organizations, including non-manufacturing sectors

While other authors have written books that analyze Toyota's manufacturing principles and the company's approach to efficiency, Rother is the first to devote years of study to Toyota's actual management behavior, revealing the essential kata. Toyota instills an invaluable mindset in its employees at all levels. Now anyone seeking breakthrough leadership strategies can apply TOYOTA KATA, a management system that is at the heart of Toyota's success.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mike Rother is the co-author of two groundbreaking workbooks, Learning to See and Creating Continuous Flow, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), a nonprofit organization that assists companies in transforming themselves based on the principles of the Toyota Business System. Both books earned Utah State University's prestigious Shingo Research Prize, named for a pioneering Japanese industrial engineer. Rother is a researcher, teacher, business consultant, and lecturer on the subjects of management, leadership, improvement, adaptiveness, and change in human organizations, and is affiliated with the University of Michigan College of Engineering (where he taught for five years) and with LEI. A guest researcher at the University of Dortmund in Germany, he divides his time between Ann Arbor and Cologne. For more information, visit http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/Homepage.html

TOYOTA KATA: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother • McGraw-Hill • Hardcover • $29.95 • On Sale September 4, 2009
 
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