Toyota knows it competitive edge is its culture. Culture to change, to be retrospective, to improve. Lean, JIT, Kanban etc were derived from a culture of striving for perfection and to develop the optimal processes for a specific company is something that takes decades and is never ending, not something that can be read in a book, taught on a course in a short period of time.
There's also that story from back when Toyoda was making sewing machines or whatever it was, and a competitor stole copies of the engineering drawings for their latest model. Toyoda shrugged and said something to the effect of "So what? The really valuable knowledge are the mistakes we made coming up with those drawings, and that's not in the drawings. By the time our competitors have managed to get their copy of our machine to the market, we will have innovated away from that for our next model. And that innovation is informed not by what our current model looks like, but by the exploration we did to get there. None of that was stolen, so after this model, they will just keep repeating the mistakes we made."
I have no idea of whether this is true at all, but I really like the story anyway.
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What I do know is true is that modern day Toyota doesn't mind sharing the solutions they have come up with to various problems, because they think the real value is in the people and processes to (a) identify the problems in the first place, and (b) come up with solutions suited to those specific problems.
Blindly applying Toyota's solutions to Toyota's problems to your organisation, just hoping that you have the same problems as Toyota and that their solutions will work also for you is a recipe for confusion, and not what matters. (Yet virtually every "development methodology" is a specific solution to a specific problem blindly applied to an organisation.)
You see this a lot in IT companies if it works for google, Amazon and Microsoft, It will work for us while we have like a millionth their load or complexity.
> None of that was stolen, so after this model, they will just keep repeating the mistakes we made.
The competitor probably could have purchased a sewing machine and replicated the engineering drawings themselves. Teardowns of competitor products is common today, and I'm sure it was back then as well.
I think Toyota's "helpful" attitude comes from the Western paranoia in the 70-90s that Japan was going to completely dominate worldwide manufacturing. After all, their rise was fast: in the mid 60s, Japanese manufactures were practically begging to sell rudimentary formed metal components in the USA, but by the early 80s, they were a leader in the high-tech manufacturing. That rise caught many people off guard and I've heard it said that the "lost decade" in Japan was the result of American trade policy specifically designed to curtail Japan's growth in manufacturing.
Viewed in that light, it makes sense that Japanese companies would appear "helpful" to American ones. Why else would Toyota co-build a plant with GM in order to teach GM their Kaizen philosophy for manufacturing?
According to the book The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer by Jeffrey Liker, one of the motivations for Toyota was to repay the debt to American manufacturers who participated in the postwar rebuilding of Japan and taught American manufacturing techniques to Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers.
