Toyota's Global Business Strategy Toyota, to all intents and purposes, has become a model for the automobile industry. As Taylor & Kahn (1997) write, automobile manufacturers are not trying to compete with Toyota as much as they are trying to learn from it and, strangely enough, Toyota appears to be quite a willing tutor. This is evidenced in the fact that, on a bi-monthly basis, the top automobile manufacturers across the United States are given a tour of Toyota’s plants and production and manufacturing facilities (Taylor & Kahn, 1997). This, however, does not put Toyota in any immediate danger of its giving away its secrets to its competitors since, as Schonberger (2001) points out, Toyota’s lean manufacturing model is not an industrial model per se as much as it is a management philosophy. This management and manufacturing philosophy is, without doubt, the key to Toyota’s global success but, upon consideration of the reasons for its recent overtake of the U.S. market...