Resumen
Toyota is famous for its enthusiastic approach to disseminating its corporate organizational culture (the Toyota Way and the Toyota Way in Sales & Marketing) globally. Translating culturally-contingent values and philosophies across disparate and distant geo-cultural territories, of course, presents many challenges. To meet these challenges, Toyota launched an initiative in 2001 to disseminate the Toyota Way 2001 and the Toyota Way in Sales and Marketing (TW/TWSM) among its 170 worldwide distributors. This initiative depends on the success of Toyota?s two problem-solving modalities: ?Kaizen? and the ?Toyota Business Practice.? Kaizen has proved successful in disseminating information among blue-collar operations (e.g. production) under what it calls the Toyota Production System (TPS). To address problems unique to white-collar sectors, Toyota subsequently developed the Toyota Business Practice (TBP) in 2005. It remains unclear, however, whether Toyota has been successful in its application of TBP among its white-collar sectors. This paper examines the effectiveness of Toyota?s new global initiative: Can TBP be effective when applied to Sales & Marketing ? an arena quite distinct from Production? To what extent do Toyota?s 170 distributors understand and practice TW/TWSM across borders now that TBP has been implemented? The results of this study suggest that because Sales & Marketing relies on different bases of data and mechanisms of action than Production, the success that Kaizen has had regarding Production is not as easily transferable to Sales & Marketing as Toyota had initially envisioned. Key Words: Innovation, Knowledge Transfer, Socialization Theory