How Elon Musk disregards Toyota’s strategy

The world’s most famous innovator and most respected manufacturing system are two different animals. Elon Musk’s style fundamentally clashes with the Toyota Production System (TPS) – the gold standard for global operational excellence based on kaizen or never-ending improvement and employee empowerment.

Born out of decades of disciplined management engineering, TPS has been emulated around the world and is shaped by what we now call as “lean thinking.” Meanwhile, Musk – the high-profile CEO behind Tesla, SpaceX and now, xAI – embodies speed, disruption and reinvention.

Both have achieved astonishing success through different paths. TPS runs on stability, standardization and a Zen-like belief in doing one thing a little better each day. If TPS were a person, it would sort its spice rack alphabetically and instruct family members to do the same.

Musk’s style? It’s more like throwing all the spices into a pressure cooker and hoping to discover the next Sriracha, Thailand’s famous hot chili sauce.

TPS emphasizes stability, standardized work and incremental change. Success comes not from flashy breakthroughs, but from thousands of small, steady improvements made by employees at every level. Musk, by contrast, operates at a dizzying speed, breaking problems down to their fundamentals and reconstructing them to get fresh insights.

He’s known for discarding traditional processes, setting aggressive deadlines, and betting big on unproven solutions. In other words, TPS is a refiner’s toolkit, while Musk is a reinventor by nature.

TPS builds long-term success through disciplined, repeatable processes. Any Toyota assembly line is meticulously designed for efficiency, safety and quality. Everything from the placement of tools to the pacing of tasks is optimized through decades of microscopic observation and feedback.

Musk’s style is defined by speed over stability. At Tesla and SpaceX, teams do it rapidly – sometimes tearing down and rebuilding systems in a matter of weeks. This approach has delivered breakthroughs, like the reusable Falcon 9 rocket or the cutting-edge Tesla Model Y, but it also comes at a cost: burnout, production bottlenecks and quality control issues.

In 2018, during Tesla’s infamous “production hell,” Musk tried to hyper-automate the Model 3 assembly line – an effort that failed so spectacularly he later admitted, “excessive automation was a mistake.” It was a rare moment when Musk’s high-speed ethos collided with the wisdom of TPS, based on common sense, not automation.

People-centric

TPS is people-centric as it empowers workers to solve problems, even small ones. A Toyota executive is often likely to be found at the gemba (shop floor) – rather than the boardroom to seek the ideas of people. Musk’s management style is famously top-down and high-pressure. He often bypasses layers of hierarchy to drive change directly, demanding 100-hour workweeks and swift execution. While this intensity has helped build some of the most valuable companies in the world, it contrasts sharply with Toyota’s deep investment in a team-based approach.

Perhaps the starkest difference lies in how each system approaches innovation. TPS thrives on incremental progress – the idea that one percent improvements every day can transform a company over time. Its strength lies in compounding. Musk’s strategy, on the other hand, is extremely revolutionary.

He’s not just building better cars – he’s trying to reinvent the entire transportation system. SpaceX isn’t just launching rockets – it’s colonizing Mars. His ventures are designed to challenge the status quo, not optimize it.

That’s why TPS, which works wonders in mature, stable systems, doesn’t fit Musk’s moonshot-heavy model. Where Toyota sees value in perfecting an existing process, Musk sees an opportunity to blow it up and build something entirely new.

Two valid models

It’s important to note that TPS is a system built for specific environments: complex but stable operations, high-volume manufacturing, and long-term employee development. In those conditions, it’s unmatched in delivering quality, efficiency, and reliability.

But for companies in frontier industries – space, AI, battery tech – TPS can be too methodical, too incremental, and at times paralyzing. These are places where the playbook hasn’t been written yet. That’s where Musk thrives. Could Musk benefit from kaizen or lean thinking? Absolutely. And to some extent, he already has.

Musk’s companies use aspects of lean thinking, like visual management, tight feedback loops and real-time problem solving, except that they don’t call it by that name. Another example, Tesla may not explicitly implement 5S good housekeeping in its traditional sense, but many of its practices align with 5S principles, albeit in a more software-driven, innovation-oriented form.

If anything, Musk offers a cautionary tale about the limits of speed: Tesla’s quality issues and factory delays often stem from skipping over the slow, disciplined work that Toyota prioritizes. But Toyota, in turn, could learn from Musk’s bias toward boldness – a willingness to challenge assumptions and push boundaries.

Comparing Musk to Toyota isn’t about who’s better – it’s about recognizing two radically different visions of how to build, scale and lead. Toyota builds enduring systems through patience and respect. Musk builds the future through urgency and audacity. Both models have reshaped industries.

But don’t expect to see Musk “going to the gemba” and becoming a model for respecting people. In the grand race to the future, we need both – the steady monk who perfects a system and the mad genius who disrupts it. In the end, it’s still the customer who’ll decide between the two management styles.

Rey Elbo is a quality and productivity improvement enthusiast. Email your story to [email protected] or DM him via Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or https://reyelbo.com. Anonymity is guaranteed even if you’re building a rocket out of paper clips.