The idea of human cloning is controversial, but cloning a successful business concept remains as desirable as ever. For HBS assistant professor Steven J. Spear, this pursuit led him to Toyota, whose perennial leadership in quality manufacturing attracts many would-be emulators.

After about four years of on-site research at Toyota and its affiliates, in 1999 Spear and HBS professor H. Kent Bowen published a Harvard Business Review article titled "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System." Understanding Toyota's production system, though, was just the first step. After all, Spear notes, the company has welcomed countless observers, even competitors, through its factory doors, but no one has yet approached Toyota's success. "The research we've done since 1999 is not so much about decoding the DNA as it is about replicating it," says Spear.

In looking for keys to that replication, Spear focused on the company's approach to solving problems and noticed the conscious way Toyota's managers involve employees in this process, even to the point of leaving a production line at suboptimal performance so that workers could develop improvements on their own.

The development process itself is also unique. Rather than adopting the first good idea, workers create iterative, structured experiments to test hypotheses and foster continuous learning. The result is a workforce that can explore problems independently, an asset that, in the long run, is more valuable than ingenuity. "It's likely a company is not going to get a design perfect on the first try," notes Spear. "It needs to have the people within its system capable of making improvements."

Spear has now helped apply Toyota's principles to much of Alcoa's worldwide manufacturing operations and to the more unusual terrain of U.S. hospitals. From smelting plants to accounting offices to hospital pharmacies, he's seen the technique pay off. "If companies learn to treat every problem as an idiosyncrasy and approach solving it as an experiment," says Spear, "they can always make progress."

- Laura Singleton (MBA '88)

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