A financial downturn and the resulting turmoil in industrial investment can decimate some businesses. These severe crises also provide a bed of new growth opportunities for others.

What is most surprising is the difference between these two extremes. The bold add higher hurdles to their product expectations. Instead of going "faster and cheaper," they go for "more lasting and smarter". This brings compounding benefits to society and their firms. We call these innovators -- "social response capitalists."

Those that get the dynamics of the new frontier are laughing their way to market dominance and further innovation.

Beyond the Quality Revolution in Industrial Thinking

Last century the great quality thinkers Deming and Juran only got it half right. All firms compete on price and quality. But in this overpopulated and extremely consumptive new world, globalization means we must readjust our industrial thinking for a smaller world.

In such a globalized 21st century, the best firms now compete on price, quality and social needs. I see new success to those now competing on declining supplies of oil, escalating costs to energy, avian and swine flu, and "global poverty," as early examples.

In this article, I focus on the lessons I learned in facilitating a key Toyota hybrid power-train council. These six recurrent benefits from auto-making relate to this new century industrial thinking overall. At Toyota, we met from 1999 to 2002 in Manhattan, Kentucky, and California, joining multiple skills. In retrospect, we caused a kind of quiet revolution.

While more than a million of these vehicles are now bought (and my confidentiality requirements honored), we debated and refined the principles of "social response product development" before the council (by 2003, we even got to pause to consider if Leonardo DiCaprio or Gwyneth Paltrow should be the first celebrity to sit in the Prius). Once Toyota locked in at the new century, they were as aligned as the Air Force Strategic Command. (This tale is still evolving, as we watch American auto-makers like GM and Chrysler rapidly decline based on missing this social need. But the cat is out of the bag).

View article on one page