The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership Quotes

“We have to change the culture from one in which people simply do their own job in their own function to make their own numbers look good (a vertical focus) to one in which people are focused horizontally on the customer and on improving value streams that deliver value across functions.”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“The act of deeply thinking through problems, energizing people, and aligning them toward a common goal is the only way to practice and develop real leadership ability.”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“The use of a good process that engages people is much more desirable, even if it does not initially achieve all the results.”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. —Ralph Nader, consumer advocate”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“Toyota’s success, in short, is not rooted in its application of a standard “lean” methodology to manufacturing, nor can it be found in any internally implemented equivalent of Six Sigma. Instead, it is rooted in its leaders. More specifically, it can be found in the approach that a Toyota leader takes, seeing self-development and training others as the only possible path, not only for finding the right solution for the problem at hand, but for constantly and consistently improving performance day after day.”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“every Toyota team member goes through a basic set of development steps at each stage of her development, following the process of basic learning by copying exactly (shu), mastering the basics so that they become second nature (ha), and becoming so masterful at the basics that she can go beyond these and improvise (ri).”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“Toyota’s concept of a good process is one that expects and reveals problems, without blame, not one that is problem-free.”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say “We have done this ourselves.” —Lao-Tsu, founder of Daoism”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“They started with no budget and had to justify every cost—and were told that only those costs that were absolutely essential to making product for the customer would be approved.”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“Rough waters are truer tests of leadership. In calm water, every ship has a good captain. —Swedish proverb”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

“Senior management is simply a flag bearer when a business decision is made. It is of no use unless others follow the flag. —Eiji Toyoda, former chairman of Toyota”
― Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development