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tunity to commercialize on a mass scale what they develop. You could say that Toyota, instead of contracting out autonomy to a Silicon Valley startup, built its own technology startups. Toyota’s strategy is not to maximize profit from autonomy as fast as possible, but rather its strategy is driven by its core values. Dr. Pratt explained: Our motivation starts with trying to make the car safer and then more fun to drive. When I first interviewed Akio Toyoda, he explained that people love cars, but do not love refrigerators. I think the difference is that the refrigera- tor is useful, but it is passive . . . you don’t control what it does. A car is an amplifier. It multiplies what you make it do by hundreds of horsepower. In autonomy we want to make cars that are more fun to drive and safer as a pri- mary goal, and if a secondary side effect pops out of that where in some situ- ations the cars can drive by themselves, that is perfectly fine, but that is not the driving goal. Dr. Kuffner has a compatible view, and I asked him if Toyota’s strategy means the company is intentionally going slower in autonomy to avoid risks, to which he replied: For Toyota, the most valuable asset that we have is our brand. Therefore, if a smaller company doesn’t have as much to lose, then they can certainly be more aggressive, which is an advantage that startups will have. We are look- ing for something that will scale to millions or tens of millions of customers every year and have the reliability and robustness expected of a company like Toyota, so the bar is higher for us. Is Toyota lagging? Not necessarily. I think other competitors market their technology more aggressively. But Toyota’s approach is to let our products speak for themselves more than some others. There are trade-offs to both approaches. (610,714 D N IN[ERZV M) NN D ISY B V-V N D 624 Robert Quinn illuminated the world of strategy and how it relates to internal culture in the 1980s with his “competing values model.””” I saw him present when this chapter was in progress and realized it is a great framework for understanding the relationship between strategy and execution. He began with two dimensions— control versus flexi- bility and internal versus external. The concept of control is a characteristic of the mechanistic model, while flexibility is characteristic of the organic model. An external focus is on the environment while an internal focus is on how a company runs its own operations. Quinn put these together into a 2 x 2 table and named the four cells (see Figure 14.4). Flexibility Open Systems (Innovator-Broker) Human Relations (Mentor-Facilitator) ¢ Team Environment Vision Driven ¢ Participative ¢ Unique Product or Service ¢ Engage People ¢ Innovative * Develop People ¢ Entrepreneurial ¢ Improvement by All ¢ Partnering Rational Goals (Producer-Director) Internal Process (Monitor-Coordinator) ¢ Hierarchy ¢ Market Driven * Rules and Procedures * Goal Achievement o Efficiency ¢ Competition ¢ Process Oriented ¢ Results Oriented ¢ Improvement by Specialists * Resource Acquisition Control Figure 14.4 Competing values framework for strategy and culture. Source: Robert Quinn, Beyond Rational Management: Mastering the Paradoxes and Competing Demands of High Performance (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988). Externally, the company can focus on control (rational goals) or flexibility (open systems). Internally, the company can tend toward control (internal process) or flexi- bility (human relations). So which quadrant is best? The answer is, it depends. First, “best” depends on the company’s strategy and environment. Second, competition among values can be broken, leading to a paradox where an organization con he ceam. ingly opposite things at once —this, yet that. In fact, some of the most succe nizations are strong in multiple areas. Think of a spider diagram giving you|.- where you can be weak in all areas, or strong in all areas, or any other com I used a spider diagram to roughly plot—that is, guesstimate —the profi ota, Western auto companies, and Tesla (see Figure 14.5). Quinn and his associates