More than 50 years Toyota is the world's biggest car maker, earning top marks from experts and customers alike for quality and innovation. Some of the reasons for Toyota's success are:
Long term planning
Instead of responding to trends, fads, and quarterly numbers, Toyota looks far down the road and tries to develop products that will resonate for a long time. The best example is the Prius hybrid which overcome the fuel problem since the gas prices and fuel economy now a top concern.
Studious speediness
Although sometimes suppliers complain that Toyota takes forever to make a decision, it is usually because the company exhaustively researches all its options, then make sure all the major stakeholders agree on a course of action. Once Toyota decides to build a car, Toyota can move a product to market faster than almost all of its competitors.
An open mind
Toyota learned many from Americans, studying Ford Motor Co's production lines and the theories of management. That helped Toyota gain a foothold in the United States, the world's biggest car market, even though the company was an outsider whose home market of Japan was vastly different. After a decades, Toyota still show a knack for figuring out what customers want, sometimes predicting American tastes better than the Detroit automakers that supposedly have home-field advantage.
Obsession with waste
Toyota's "continuous improvement" ethos is legendary throughout industry, but Magee believes the real secret is a profound disdain for inefficiency, whether it's wasted time, excess material, or a scrap of trash on a factory floor. "At a lot of companies, if something's going well and it's profitable, they'll move on to something else, Magee says. "But if Toyota can attach a hood in eight minutes, they'll find a way to whittle that down to four minutes, then two minutes, then who knows...."
Humility
The company culture of Toyota emphasizes teamwork over individual stars. "Toyota executives don't see themselves as bigger than the company or the customer or the product, " Magee writes. "It's the most humble company I've been in." The plant manager in Toyota factories doesn't even get a reserved parking space, a perk that is practically universal among manufacturing companies.
How the business gained success
