The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation, by Matthew E. May. speaks to Toyota’s product development mentality more than other books that just explain the manufacturing elements. It may provide some insight for you.

A frequent quote about Toyota:
We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes” - A Senior Toyota Executive

Yosh!

100% agree on getting the ‘right people on the bus’.
It’s the people that make the journey.

Good hearing from you.

I’ll be interested in reading this one. Others of similar interest include “Good to Great”, Built to Last, and Organizing Genious.

Sadly, I agree fully with you that replicating any of the concepts is extremely difficult. In my experience, it is not as easy as having the right intentions and saying the right things and is further frustrated by the fact that all these case studies are carried out on the recognizable successes and the conclusions are suspect; that is, the identified causal principals may be merely correlated.

One truth has become quite apparent (to me); at the bare minimum you have get the ‘right’ people together, without that you can start nothing.

The book has a whole chapter dedicated to the product develop around the Prius. Basically, management gave the engineers some tough deadlines, with some really tough specs to boot (i.e. +50 miles per gallon) and the dev process Toyota had in place wasn’t sufficient.

They needed to come up with something completely different. And they did.

I haven’t read Toyota Talent so I can’t comment on that per se. But so far, I am really enjoying the Toyota Way. It gets deep into the principles, and how they manifest themselves in everything Toyota does.

Thanks for the comment.