The flying car will be a Toyota
On joint ventures, lean manufacturing, and the lesson all businesses should take away from watching Toyota try really hard new things
Toyota has announced a joint venture with Joby Aviation, a company developing a six-propeller, five-person aircraft that runs on electric motors and batteries. It’s not exactly a flying car, but they’ve labeled it an “air taxi” for its closer resemblance to George Jetson’s aerocar than to anything else we see.
■ The joint venture is meant to put Toyota’s manufacturing approach to work building the vehicle of Joby’s design. This makes a world of sense, considering Toyota is world-class at taking manufacturing to scale. No company produces more cars.
■ If the arrangement itself is less than surprising, perhaps the real surprise is in the fact that even after all this time, there remains such resistance to adopting, adapting, and applying the Toyota Production System. It’s been around for decades, documented exhaustively, and applied successfully worldwide. Some of the approach gets distilled into “lean manufacturing” principles, but that’s only a component of the whole approach.
■ Toyota is a premier example of an organization assembled around the principle of continuous learning. Any organization is only as good as what its people know. Trying new things (like building air taxis), learning from the process, and then applying what was learned isn’t all that complex a concept. But only some institutions are any good at applying it.
■ Any time you see a serious company like Toyota stretching to try something far-out like this, look beyond the product itself: It’s a pretty good sign they’re really trying to learn how to do ever harder and more novel things. Whether the product succeeds or fails, the learning itself becomes part of the company culture and thus an element of competitive advantage. A whole lot of institutions far beyond automotive and aircraft manufacturing ought to take note.
