XP2005 - the Toyota way

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Marc Evers ran an interesting workshop based around the ideas in the book The Toyota Way (Author Jeffrey Liker, ISBN 0071392319*). The attraction of studying Toyota is that the company's success in the mature car industry points to a tried and tested lean approach that evidently scales up well, has lessons to teach other industries such as software, and that can easily be brought up in conversations with "men in ties" executives.
What I got most out of the workshop was an appreciation of how deeply long-term thinking is embedded in the Toyota culture, and a feeling for the very rich interrelationships between the 14 principles (much like the interrelationships between barriers, attractors and probes described in the Cynefin approach).
Among the group the topic that probably generated the most discussion was the idea of a company's long-term philosophy: does your company have one, do people know what it is, and is it visible in the company's actions and intentions?
* Tom Poppendieck also recommended the book Product Development for the Lean Enterprise to people who wanted to understand more how the lessons of Toyota might apply to the software industry.