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Harvard Business Review

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW


SUMMARIES OF THE ARTICLES: JULY --- DECEMBER2007

Month July/August 2007
Article #1: Lessons From Toyota’s Long Drive
Article # 2: Using The Balanced Scorecard As A Strategic Management System
Article # 3: To Succeed In The Long Term, Focus On The Middle Term

ARTICLE # 1
LESSONS FROM TOYOTA’S LONG DRIVE
An Interview with Katsuaki Watanabe by Thomas A. Stewart and Anand P. Raman

As Toyota becomes the world’s biggest automaker, the company finds its much-heralded ways of managing for the long term to be more important—and under greater pressure—than ever before.
Toyota’s way is to measure everything—even the noise that car doors make when they open and close as workers perform their final inspections on newly manufactured automobiles. By any measure, whether esoteric or mundane, Toyota Motor Corporation has become one of the most successful companies in the world today. This year marks the 70th anniversary of Toyota’s founding, 50 years since the Japanese company started exporting cars to the United States, and a decade since it launched the world’s first commercial hybrid, the Prius. If, as Toyota officially forecast last December, it sells 9.34 million vehicles in 2007, it will overtake America’s General Motors to become the world’s biggest automobile manufacturer.
Toyota is, arguably, already the best carmaker on the planet. For almost 15 years J.D. Power and other research firms have consistently rated Toyota and its luxury line, Lexus, among the top automotive brands in terms of reliability, initial quality, and long-term durability. Toyota is also the most profitable car manufacturer: In the financial year that ended in March 2007, it made a profit of $13.7 billion, whereas GM and Ford reported losses of $1.97 billion and $12.61 billion, respectively, in 2006. In fact, Toyota’s market...