Reddit reviews The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

The Toyota Way. It's like an Industrial Engineers Bible nowadays.

TPS predates Six Sigma and Lean Production. Lean actually came out of TPS. As they show in the video, Lean can be applied to pretty much any process. Toyota uses it for manufacturing, here they apply it in a food bank, and it is also widely used in software development.

Notice how they apply Value Stream Mapping. They start by looking at what is happening, and listing all the steps that add value, and those that do not. Putting food in a box adds value, running around to get the stuff does not add value and is waste. By eliminating waste they can reduce the takt time from 3 minutes to 11 seconds.

Another important aspect of TPS is respect for people. In its entire history, Toyota has never laid off any (salaried) workers during hard times. Instead it uses the free time to invest in kaizen.

In this case, respect for people means giving back to the American people, because the USA helped rebuild Japan after WW2.


If you want to learn more about TPS, go read Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production, written by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System.

I can also recommend The Toyota Way and The Toyota Way To Lean Leadership. These are a bit more recent and an excellent insight in the Toyota way of working.

The Toyota Way is great engineering management book and a good introduction to Lean Thinking.

What exactly do you want to pursue? Which field? What type of position?

I ask because in my job, and in my previous job, I use maybe one-tenth of what I learned in college. And, like you, I graduated with a 2.9 GPA, nor did I take the FE (and I never plan to). I don't believe this to be a negative for you.

If you want to do something technical like design work, then you should keep fresh with Solidworks (and other modeling programs) as well as analysis software (Cosmos and other FEA software, Matlab, etc.).

If you want to do something like manufacturing, just read up on manufacturing in books, like The Toyota Way and maybe do the things listed above for design, just so you can keep it on your resume.

And based on your comments below about wanting to "be a leader"... you have to start at the bottom, I'm sorry to say. You can't expect to just walk into a company and be someone to look up to within your first week, month, or even year there. You're going to spend many months (and maybe more) just learning - learning about the culture, learning about the industry, learning about the technical stuff, learning about the product or clients, etc. Then you will do things more on your own, rather than for someone. Then after a good while of doing that, you may have proved yourself to move up the ranks. That's just how it goes.

you should read the toyota way, it's one of the smartest run corporations in existence... so much so that when the 'accelerator problems' that didn't actually exist appeared that summer, i figured it was bunk, or would be fixed within a couple months.

Thank you so much for the reply! What is the best answer you've gotten when interviewing the Engineers, or most interesting? Also is this the book you are talking about.

I recommend these two books. really helped me with my management style and allowed me to see problems from different perspective

Asking the right questions:a guide to critical thinking

Toyota Way Mangement Principles

MIT opencourseware is pretty interesting

Also The Toyota Way is always a good start.

There’s a book about the Toyota manufacturing and management methodology that’s really interesting

https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-Manufacturer/dp/0071392319

The history of Toyota and Honda are interesting on this

Honda’s global strategy? Go local. tldr Honda are a lot less automated then you would think as this improves their ability to innovate

The Machine That Changed the World and others on Toyota go into how they changed their production methods

May I stand on a soapbox?

Automation isn't that simple. Automating processes that are already flawed to begin with is worse than no automation at all - as all automation does of a bad system is just compound the issue, and bring in new constraints.

Basically - automation is a solution, but it isn't the only solution - in fact, automation should be the last solution looked at it - and your solution should be the last step in the process improvement.

If you're serious about getting into management, and you work with processes that you feel could be made better or automated - I'd suggest the following reading:

The Goal

The Toyota Way

I've not seen it, so I'll have to look it up. Thanks!

Related media to NUMMI - The Toyota Way is an excellent book to learn about Toyota's production system, and the lessons learned from implementing it at NUMMI.

Like everyone else says, it's having the parts show up right when you need it rather than buying bulk and storing stuff until it's needed.

This process (now coined "lean construction" or "lean manufacturing" or "lean xxx") was started by Toyota and has spread all over the place. I had a Lean Construction class in college (BS in Construction Management) and we used The Toyota Way as our text.

You should look into Toyota, especially the Toyota Production System. For me they're the prime example of a company following a long-term vision over short-term profits. Liker's The Toyota Way gives some excellent examples in that regard.