no reason to be satisfied."
The Process
What is so striking about Toyota's Georgetown factory is, in fact, that it only looks like a car factory. It's really a big brain--a kind of laboratory focused on a single mission: not how to make cars, but how to make cars better. The cars it does make--one every 27 seconds--are in a sense just a by-product of the larger mission. Better cars, sure; but really, better ways to make cars. It's not just the product, it's the process.
The process is, in fact, paramount--so important that "Toyota also has a process for teaching you how to improve the process," says Steven J. Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT who has studied Toyota for more than a decade. The work is really threefold: making cars, making cars better, and teaching everyone how to make cars better. At its Olympian best, Toyota adds one more level: It is always looking to improve the process by which it improves all the other processes.
There's a certain Zen sensibility to that--but also a relentlessly capitalistic, tenaciously competitive quality. If your factory is just making cars, once a day the whistle blows and it's quitting time, no more cars to make that day. If your factory is making a new way to make cars, the whistle never blows, you're never done.
Without fanfare, in fact, Toyota is confounding conventional wisdom about U.S. manufacturing. Toyota isn't outsourcing; it's creating jobs in the United States. It isn't having trouble manufacturing complicated products here--it's opening factories as quickly as its systems and quality standards allow. It's offering union wages and good health insurance (to avoid being unionized), and selling the products its American workers make to Americans, profitably and more inexpensively than its U.S. competitors.
So put aside everything you think you know about the current state of the car business in the United States. Sure, Toyota enjoys some structural advantages in the form of lower health care and pension costs. But the real reason it is thriving is because of people like Chad Buckner saying, "There's no reason to be satisfied." It's not just the way Toyota makes cars--it's the way Toyota thinks about making cars.
That thinking is hardly novel: Lean manufacturing and continuous improvement have been around for more than a quarter-century. But the incessant, almost mindless repetition of those phrases camouflages the real power behind the ideas. Continuous improvement is tectonic. By constantly questioning how you do things, by constantly tweaking, you don't outflank your competition next quarter. You outflank them next decade.
Toyota is far from infallible, of course. In the past two years, recalls for quality and safety problems have spiked dramatically--evidence of the strain that rapid growth puts on even the best systems. But those quality issues have seized the attention of Toyota's senior management. In the larger arena, when the strategy isn't to build cars but to 

year. That number is not just large, it's arresting, it's mind-boggling. How much have you changed your work routine in the past decade? Toyota's line employees change the way they work dozens of times a year.
In the case of the blue tote, the change came out of a routine analysis of dozens of assembly-line jobs at Georgetown. When the simplification effort started three years ago, Artrip's team found 44 jobs where assemblers had to make 1 or 2 decisions as they installed parts. They found 23 workstations that required between 7 and 11 decisions.
Any jobs requiring 7 to 11 decisions in 55 seconds were going to cause problems. So dozens of jobs incurred small changes--grab the blue tote instead of choosing individual parts. Now, 85 line jobs require just 1 or 2 decisions. Not a single job requires 7 or more decisions. The work is easier, the results are better.
This is exactly the kind of work Artrip has spent more than half his career at Toyota doing: looking for ways to make the assembly line faster, simpler, safer--ways to make it easier to do the work perfectly. Continuous improvement is not some add-on to the real work, it isn't some special project Artrip has to do on top of his routine responsibilities, nor is he a guy who parachutes into the assembly line from an engineering building somewhere else. It is what he comes to the factory every day thinking about. It isn't exhausting, it's exhilarating.
Artrip has been at Georgetown for 19 years. The way he does his work is so compelling it has become part of his personal life. "When I'm mowing the grass, I'm thinking about the best way to do it. I'm trying different turns to see if I can do it faster," he says. He has analyzed his morning routine. "I do the same standardized work in the shower every morning. I have to get here at 6 a.m., and I know it takes 19 minutes, including walking into the plant." He smiles. "I've maximized my sleep time."
Problems First
James Wiseman remembers the moment he realized that Toyota wasn't just another workplace but a different way of thinking about work. Before joining the company, he had been a factory manager, first for a swimsuit maker, then for a steel-tubing manufacturer. He joined Toyota's still-new Georgetown plant in October 1989 as manager of community relations. Today, he's vice president of corporate affairs for all of Toyota manufacturing in North America.
At the swimsuit factory and the tube factory, "there was always a lot of looking for the silver bullet," Wiseman says, "looking for the big, dramatic improvement. And I had the attitude that when you achieved something, you achieved it. You enjoyed it." He was steeped in the American business culture of not admitting, or even discussing, problems in settings like meetings.
In Wiseman's early days, Georgetown was run by Fujio Cho, now the chairman of Toyota worldwide. Every Friday, there was a senior staff meeting. "I started out going in there and reporting some of my little successes," 

says Wiseman. "One Friday, I gave a report of an activity we'd been doing"--planning the announcement of a plant expansion--"and I spoke very positively about it, I bragged a little. After two or three minutes, I sat down.
"And Mr. Cho kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, 'Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.'"
Wiseman says it was like a lightning bolt. "Even with projects that had been a general success, we would ask, 'What didn't go well so we can make it better?'" At Toyota, Wiseman says, "I have come to understand what they mean when I hear the phrase, 'Problems first.'"
It's another cliché that is powerful if you take it seriously: You can't solve problems unless you admit them. At Toyota, there is a presumption of imperfection. Perfection is a fine goal, but improvement is much more realistic, much more human. Not a 15% improvement by the end of the quarter, a 1% improvement by the end of the month.
The challenge, of course, is to make the rhetoric real, to make the presumption of imperfection integral to how people think and work. Pete Gritton knows better than most how that happens; he and his staff have hired all the Kentuckians who work at Toyota Georgetown. He's vice president of HR and administration for Georgetown, and vice president of HR for Toyota manufacturing in North America.
"We want people to be problem solvers," Gritton says. "Because every time there's a problem, we don't send out some guy in a white shirt with a clipboard." New hires--10% of job applicants make it through screening tests that include a team-building exercise--are immersed in Toyota's process for process improvement. There are daily work-group meetings, a written suggestion program, and longer-term problem-solving teams. But everything is grounded in two hard realities.
First, of course, "we have to make 2,000 cars a day. We can't vote about how to make each one," Gritton says. "We can't stop every few minutes and change the process." And then there is the most basic rule, the reason "continuous improvement" is not a matter of character or national culture or willpower, but is itself a kind of assembly line. "The rule here is that improving something starts after understanding the standard--understanding how we do it now," Gritton says. "If you don't understand what you're trying to improve, how do you know that your suggestion is an improvement?"
No one at Toyota Georgetown can talk about his work without explaining how it has just changed, or is about to change. Chris Gentry, a supervisor for instrument-panel assembly, is showing how his area is about to be redesigned. It was set up just this year to handle the 2007 Camry--but after working with it for most of a year, workers now see inefficiencies. Some work will be moved back to an area where kits are assembled; some movement of parts can be off-loaded to seven newly built 

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