Managing by Means

Definition

Managing by means (MBM) — a term Rother credits to H. Thomas Johnson, author of the book's foreword — means treating a work process itself, not just the financial or output numbers it produces, as the object of management attention. Johnson's argument, cited directly by Rother, is that Western management treats means as subordinate to results, while at Toyota "the means, or process, is nothing less than results-in-the-making." The contrasting term is managing by results (MBR): setting a target number and driving people toward it without regard for how the process that generates that number actually operates.

In the Book

Johnson's foreword frames the entire book through this lens, describing his own study visits to Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky plant starting in 1992 and Toyota executives (including President Fujio Cho) telling him that "organizational routines for improvement and adaptation, not quantitative/financial targets, define the pathway to competitive advantage." Rother's introduction echoes this by contrasting Toyota's kata-based approach with the "results-oriented level of thinking" common elsewhere. The concept resurfaces as a footnote in Chapter 5, tied explicitly to the target-condition mechanism: a target condition is a condition to be achieved, described in process terms, never expressed as a financial or accounting target — the numbers follow from the process change, not the other way around. Rother later summarizes the contrast starkly: Toyota "grow[s] management by objectives into its full potential," while other organizations tend to "reduce it to 'manage by the numbers.'"

Why It Matters

MBM versus MBR names a fork every manager eventually hits: hold people to a number and let them find any means to hit it, or specify and improve the means and treat the number as its downstream signal. The MBR path is faster to implement (a target is easy to state) but invites gaming, short-termism, and a process nobody actually understands or controls. The MBM path is slower to set up but keeps the organization's attention on the thing it can actually act on — the recurring pattern behind any "hit the metric, break the system" failure mode, wherever that metric was substituted for the process that was supposed to produce it.