5. Building a New Framework

It is, in short, not a particular organisational practice that needs to be reconstructed and reproduced but its underlying purpose and/or its philosophy, i.e., operational excellence through continuous improvement and the respect of people in the case of the Toyota Way, to find the direction to the True North. The culture of the traditional Japanese agrarian society, of self-reliance, of collectivism, of kaizen etc. is the totalistic construct which provides the context for both understanding and action and without which much of the social practice including the corporate practice of Toyota loses both its bite and its true meaning. The comparable moral code of the Western way of life used to be what we may call the individual self-actualisation in attaining human excellence, going back to the ancient Greeks, equal to maximum value creation at any point of time, in a business environment.