Is that a halo?

Jon Gertner's look at Toyota in the Times magazine, From 0 to 60 to World Domination, is one of the best business stories I've read in years.

It makes you wonder if American companies copied more of Toyota's management and philosophical style, we'd stop associating corporations with evil.

It's a long piece; some of its most interesting sections:

It can be simplistic, and often a distortion, to accept a corporate executive as the personification of a corporation, especially one as large and varied as Toyota. Yet [Jim] Press serves as an apt representative, and not merely because his career arc mirrors the company’s ascendancy. Like Toyota, he expresses himself in private with modesty and care, yet in public his speeches are bold, declarative and effervescent. In his office, he has an informal, relaxed presence and exhibits just a hint of an avuncular stoop; yet he loves to race cars and sometimes swims 5,000 meters a day. Press also has a fluency in the company’s arcane systems and history. Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.” This phrase should be cause for skepticism, especially coming from a company so adept at marketing and public relations. I lost count of how many times Toyota executives, during the course of my reporting, repeated it and how often I had to keep from recoiling at its hollow peculiarity. And yet, the catch phrase — to enrich and serve society — was not intended, at least originally, to function as a P.R. motto. Historically the idea has meant offering car customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new plants, technologies and employees. It has also captured an obsessive obligation to build better cars, which reflects the Toyota belief in kaizen, or continuous improvement. Finally, the phrase carries with it the responsibility to plan for the long term — financially, technically, imaginatively. “The company thinks in years and decades,” Michael Robinet, a vice president at CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that focuses on the global auto industry, told me. “They don’t think in months or quarters.” ...

Toyota itself keeps pushing ahead. Under its system, an engineer appointed to lead a new project has a huge budget and near absolute authority over the project. Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves — the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu — what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition. Most extreme, perhaps, was the task Yuji Yokoya set for himself when he was asked to redesign the Sienna minivan. He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior. Curiously, even when his three-year, 53,000-mile journey was finished, Yokoya could not stop. One person at Toyota told me he bumped into him at a hotel in the middle of Death Valley, Calif., after the new Sienna came out in 2004. Apparently, Yokoya wanted to see how his redesigned van was handling in the desert. ...

Toyota grew out of an entrepreneurial foray by the Toyoda family — which made a fortune building textile looms early in the last century — in the 1930s under the leadership of Kiichiro Toyoda. (That’s also when it was decided that the car company would be better served by replacing the family’s “d” with a “t,” in part because it was deemed easier to write and pronounce. The Toyoda loom works did not change its name.) Toyota’s success has often been attributed to a Japanese quality of persistence and ingenuity. One of the first Western academics to look deep inside the company, Michael Cusumano, now a professor of management at M.I.T., debunked that notion when he compared Toyota and Nissan in the early 1980s. “The founders and the managers created and refined Toyota company culture, which is far more powerful than Japanese culture,” he says. “It does build on many things that are Japanese — precision, quality, loyalty. But the Toyota culture dominates.” ...

The idea of actually situating a parts supplier inside an assembly plant is wholly novel. But the methods of low inventory — or what’s known as “just in time” production — are hardly unique to Toyota; these have been emulated with great success by other automakers. The same goes for other processes at the San Antonio plant: the line stoppages and quality checks, the time spent by workers discussing hand and body movements in the hope of shaving a crucial half-second from their work. Over the years, Toyota has assisted competitors, especially G.M., in helping to adopt its system, believing it to be in its interest to share practices, especially in exchange for insights into a rival’s methods. ...

You might figure that Toyota is elated at the way things have gone lately: its market share in the U.S. has risen in the past couple of years while American automakers like Ford (and to a lesser degree, G.M.) have been in a tailspin. But this assumption is probably only partly correct. “We want them to be strong,” Jim Press says, referring to Ford and G.M. “When you play a ball game, you don’t want to win by errors.” Jim Womack puts it more bluntly: “The last thing Toyota wants is for any of those guys to collapse.” For one thing, it could be politically disastrous for the Japanese company if it were considered responsible for the death of a grand American institution. “But it’s also completely worthless to Toyota in the market,” Womack adds. “They’re selling all the vehicles they can make already. What they actually want is just continuous, slow decline — decline at the same rate that they have the ability to organically expand. That’s the ideal world for them.” ...

Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe, who like all of the company’s top executives is based in Japan, recently declared that his dream for Toyota is to build a car that does not hurt anyone and cleans the air when it’s running. This is not quite as fantastical as it sounds. Several automakers are developing cars with sensors that literally prevent them from crashing (though not from being crashed into). And in the heavy intersections in Tokyo where air quality is poor, Takahiro Fujimoto told me, part of Watanabe’s vision is already real: “The emission gas of some advanced cars is in fact cleaner than the intake air.”

Toyota logo found in various places online.