 Dear students, we have discussed about various different organisational structures in multinational companies and how the process of internationalisation that affects the structure of an organisation and how does the structure of the organisation evolve. We have talked about different models and different types of structures that are available to be adopted in academic literature. In this topic, we are going to talk about a particular case study of an organisation. It is a very well-known organisation. I think everybody knows the name. We are going to talk about the Toyota company and we are going to talk about the Toyota way, how they keep their organisational structure intact and how do they manage their international operations as far as organisational structure is concerned. So as we discussed in the previous topic that Japanese companies have a centralised approach to organisational structures. They don't want to give too much autonomy to their foreign subsidiaries yet they want their subsidiaries to be effective and working according to the requirement of the context. So how do they do that? How do they actually make it successful? They have made a Toyota way. So let's take a look. Over here you can see that this is a production floor of Toyota in USA. This is showing that this particular person is working on some kind of charts and complicated and complex charts are a part of the Toyota way. So this picture is showing one aspect of the Toyota way that they make sure that their systems and their processes and flow that is depicted and illustrated in the form of complex and very much informative charts which are then displayed in various parts of their physical facilities in their offices in their production floors and various places where it is required. So that is one aspect. Let's look at some details about the Toyota company. It has got according to 2017-18 statistics. It has got 350 employees working in 27 plants worldwide out of which 18 plants are in Japan. So most of their production facilities are in Japan but some other production facilities are also in other parts of the world. Yet although they have kept themselves so centralized and they have kept their business in a family kind of a structure, they are second ranked in global sales and in 2017 Toyota sold 10.2 million vehicles all over the world, 10.2 million vehicles all over the world. That means that this is a huge organization with global production facilities and they are tapping the entire global market and also working worldwide with production facilities all over the world. Yet they want to keep their company values intact. For that what they have done is that they have established the Toyota Institute at Makabe Japan. So this walks as a kind of corporate university in which corporate values, strategies, they are devised and planned out and then they are translated and communicated to people who are responsible for driving action throughout the world. So what they do is that they take their managers to the Toyota Institute which is their corporate university, they bring them there, they train them, they introduce them to the aspects of their culture and then they make sure that they take those cultural aspects to their Toyota way and inculcate them in their foreign operations. We must prevent the Toyota way from getting more and more diluted as Toyota grows overseas. So they have made a part of their culture and a part of their strategy that they will not let the Toyota way be indigenized too much or be diluted too much. They will keep the Japanese values and Japanese culture inculcated in their company and in the way work is done and formalized in their organization even if they are working in a totally different culture let's say America. So the challenge is that Toyota is growing more quickly than the company's ability to transplant its culture to the foreign markets. So for that they have established this Toyota Institute in which what they do is that they carry out different trainings. We will discuss one example of this training that when global managers are hired an initial training of around a week is given to these global managers. This is a week long program a very intensive program in which the activities which are carried out in those one week those are intense and they depict the values and strategy of the Toyota culture. It is usually a 12 to 14 hours day so the people who are involved in this training what they are actually immersed in this training process it's not that you have just you know walked in you have listened to a lecture and you've walked out of it no you are made a part of that culture a part of that training program you made to live that so that you know you are transformed in that process of learning when you are actually living 2012 to 14 hours a day in that intensive training program and this is focused on inculcating the Toyota way. How do they inculcate their culture? First of all opening lectures are given by presidents, past presidents and top level executives. They talk about their experiences they talk about how they do their work they do their work they talk about their achievements they are what they have been able to do they are the important tasks that they've been able to perform and therefore by listening to people in a particular way you learn how you are going to do your own job. Then one of the values of Toyota is Genchi Genbutsu and that is that that stresses that production problems can only be analyzed from the production floor and not by sitting behind the desk so it means that they try to inculcate this practice this value that you don't sit on your table even if you are a manager you must be there on the production floor you must be involved in the production process you must be aware of what is going on at the production floor so you must be involved in the production process and therefore this practice of Genchi Genbutsu is inculcated in the global managers then the practice of Kaizen which is which means continuous improvement that is inculcated interpersonal values which includes complex problem solving and how they do it complex problem solving co they divide complex problems into smaller set of you know solvable problems and do exercises about that then interpersonal values of mutual respect at the workplace you know Japanese culture may mutual respect very important it's not that they are groveling it's just that they are showing respect so mutual respect is very important in the Toyota organization then consensus building they work with creating consensus and then finally understanding of Toyota's richly informative yet complex production charts factory screens and color coded graphics these are what we had just seen in the picture in which that person was working on that some some chart of on the production floor so this is how the Toyota organization inculcates the values which are important for Toyota they call it the Toyota way they have established a Toyota Institute to make people learn those values and that is how they are able to translate those values the Toyota way to the entire global network of their organization