Toyota Kaizens... a Shrub?

By Jon Miller | Post Date: October 17, 2005 1:41 PM | Comments: 0

The Toyota Roof Garden, a biotech business of Toyota, has developed an air-cleaning Kirsch Pink. This new type of shrub absorbs 1.3 times more pollutants than Cherry Sage.

Clever American corporate strategy consultants might think spending resources to improve a shrub is a dangerous diversion away from core competencies for an automobile manufacturing company.

However, they would be wrong. I predict that Toyota's big winning bet on hybrids is just the beginning of what we'll recognize as Toyota's lead in the environmental business.

Toyota's "global earth charter" for environmental responsibility is also very much in line with at least 3 of Toyota's 7 Guiding Principles:

1-Honor the language and spirit of the law of every nation and undertake open and fair corporate activities to be a good corporate citizen of the world.

3-Dedicate ourselves to providing clean and safe products and to enhancing the quality of life everywhere through all our activities.

4-Create and develop advanced technologies and provide outstanding products and services that fulfill the needs of customers worldwide.

On a larger scale, Toyota has teamed up with Green Earth Center, a Tokyo-based NGO to stop desertification in China. Toyota has put out a North America Environmental Performance Report for the past 5 years.

The October 2005 update called Highlights of Toyota's Environmental Progress is a good place to get an update. There's much more on their environmental work within the Toyota website.

As an example of corporate social responsibility this is typical of the concern of Japanese manufacturers for the environment. Imagine if the second largest economy in the world with half of the population of the U.S.A. was fit into space about the size of Montana. That's Japan. Things can get polluted very fast if you don't kaizen the environmental issues.

Whenever we visit world class Lean firms in Japan on Gemba's Lean benchmarking trip we are impressed by the examples of environmental kaizen such as power generation at factories with solar panels, water purification, and zero landfill factories. Toyota, as usual, has the resources, know how and determination to take it to another level.

So what's next, self-mowing grass?

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