Team Toyota, Transporting the Toyota Culture to the Camry Plant in Kentucky

Team Toyota, Transporting the Toyota Culture to the Camry Plant in Kentucky

1) Overview of the book

The book that I read was Team Toyota, Transporting the Toyota Culture to the Camry Plan in Kentucky, wrote by Terry L Besser, in 1996. She did interviews with employees in all the levels of the company, but with a very small population, fact that she points every time during the book as a limitation of the study. They main idea of the book is to discuss the introduction of the Japanese model of management and its implications in the Americans employees. Besser gives us a panorama of the American model of management, as well as the traditional bureaucratic western model. The author right in the introduction of the book points some of the key differences in the Japanese model:

• Both structures are pyramidal, but the shapes are different, the Japanese is tall, thin, and finely grained, the reason for this is to allocate the seniority promotions.

• In bureaucratic pyramids, the decisions are made in the top, and are communicate to the lower levels. In contrast, in Japanese organizations, decisions are made by group of people close to the issue under consideration, and then sent to upper managers to authorize changes.

• The welfare corporatism, the community of fate ideology, and self contained company-sponsored unions.

The question that guides the book is: Will American workers respond to the Japanese style of organizing by working hard to help the organization achieve its goals? The book start explaining how the structure of the Japanese model: work team, company teams, and corporate team. She also spent a chapter talking about two main issues for the company: employees on restriction – workers that are injured or ill and can't perform their normal job but do not require rehabilitation at the hospital or home, and how the employees do almost all the tasks on automatic, and benefits and challenges of that. Besser will also give a special chapter about how is the environment for the women at Toyota. At the end Besser will summarize the perceptions, and show some facts on whether or not the transplantation of the culture was a success.

2) Topic Analysis and Correlation

The main idea of this chapter is to relate the topic with the discussion we had throughout the semester. To better organize the ideas, I will separate the discussion with the same titles used for classes, and relate those topics with the book.