Extreme Toyota offers the first real, comprehensive inside look at what makes one of the world?s best companies run. With unprecedented access to the inner working of Toyota, the authors spent six years researching the company, interviewing hundreds of executives and employees, and discovering the company's secret of success. What they uncovered will surprise you and change the way you think about business. Simultaneously rigidly traditional and seriously innovative, it is precisely those internal contradictions that make the company so successful and admired.

HIROTAKA TAKEUCHI, EMI OSONO, and NORIHIKO SHIMIZU are business school graduates from the University of California, Berkeley, The George Washington University, and Stanford University, respectively. They are professors at one of Japan's top business schools, Hitotsubashi University, Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy (www.ics.hit-u.ac.jp). Takeuchi works closely with Professor Michael E. Porter of Harvard University, with whom he coauthored Can Japan Compete? (2000). All three authors are also frequent speakers at conferences and seminars around the world.