Playing a car and mouse game
| But if truth be told, neither book is really about the company named in the title. Instead, these are volumes about how other organisations can (or have) successfully adapted the management techniques perfected by these two diverse powerhouses. |
| Capodagli and Jackson turned Disney inside out in the original edition of The Disney Way. Interestingly, that book was written without an "in" to Disney""the company did not cooperate with the writers and Capodagli and Jackson wrote it entirely based on extensive "outside" research. Still, the first The Disney Way picked up rave reviews""Fortune magazine called it the Best Business Book of the Year in 1999 with reviewer Anne Fisher declaring that it was "so useful you may whistle while you work". |
| The focus shifts slightly with the revised edition. Now it's not so much about Walt Disney's "Dream. Believe. Dare. Do" philosophy and how it helped create "the happiest place on earth"; it's not even about Michael Eisner's fall from grace, the EuroDisney debacle, the Pixar pullout and other such disasters that Disney has seen in the past decade or so. This time, Capodagli and Jackson demonstrate how diverse companies "" Ernst & Young, Four Seasons Hotels, The Cheesecake Factory and Griffins Hospitals, among others "" have applied the same four-word credo to their businesses and prospered. It's still zippy, well-written and entertaining. It still doesn't have the Disney stamp of approval (or cooperation) and it still smacks of self-promotion "" the authors run a training and consulting business based on the Disney Way. |
| Unlike The Disney Way, the writers of Toyota Talent had the blessings of the company they were tracking "" in fact Meier was a group leader at Toyota for over a decade. Liker's association with Toyota first found voice in 2003 with The Toyota Way, where he distilled 14 management principles based on the company's formidable track record in waste elimination and quality improvement. But there was a serious lacuna in that book "" it was an overview of where Toyota was, without offering a roadmap for others to get there. The Toyota Way Fieldbook, where Meier came on board as co-author for the first time, then, was a do-it-yourself version of the principles listed in the first book. But the 4Ps "" philosophy, process, people and partners, and problem solving "" needed further attention. Hence, Toyota Talent, the first in a further four-book series on just how Toyota does what it does. |
| Toyota Talent takes an almost textbook-ish approach to understanding how the Japanese carmaker's disciplined approach to talent development. It begins by understanding the genesis of the Toyota Production System (TPS) "" an American war effort called Training Within Industry (TWI), which it exported to Japan after World War II to help industry there. The Japanese adopted and improved upon TWI and the Job Instruction method so well, they made it their own. From there, the authors do to TPS what the Japanese did to TWI "" adapt it to their convenience, without losing the essence of the original. Talent development, suggest Liker and Meier, is essentially about identifying critical knowledge, transferring that knowledge to others and then verifying that learning and its resultant success. Translate it into plain English and what they're suggesting is that each job needs to be exactly defined and its requirements stated, new learners need to be placed with efficient, on-the-ball trainers, and don't forget to follow up. Devotees of lean management will lap up every word, every flow chart and every worksheet in Toyota Talent. The average business book reader may not want to plough through all the detail, but if lean management plays any role in your organisation's strategies, you'll find there's gold in these pages. |
| TOYOTA TALENT |
| Jeffrey K Liker and David P Meier Tata McGraw-Hill Rs 350; 326 pages |
| THE DISNEY WAY |
| Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson Tata McGraw-Hill Rs 299; 312 pages |