I was just watching a presentation by Kenji Hiranabe on Toyota's product development.

In the presentation, Kenji talks about meeting a Toyota Chief Engineer, Mr. Nobuaki Katayama. Now, Toyota's management culture has been the topic of an increasing number of articles and talks over the past few years within the agile software development community. One of the things that many such presentations have pointed out (myself included) is Toyota's appreciation for skill and craftsmanship.

Kenji's presentation about Mr. Katayama, the Chief Engineer for Toyota Supra, Lexus SC and others, includes a very illustrating example of how this shows - Mr. Katayama designed manual transmission systems for 18 years before becoming a Chief Engineer.

18 years.

That's quite different from what we're used to in so many organizations in the western world where it's commonplace to have product managers and other senior management without any clue whatsoever regarding what it takes to build such a product. It is most unfortunate that we have this dominant model where people with an MBA and a pure management background are considered prime candidates to lead a product development organization. In practice, that often leads to sub-par products that are managed by cost and sales rather than by quality and value delivered to the user.

Too few of these organizations' managers seem to truly care about the products they're building nor do they seem to understand how those products are built.

In his keynote speech at Agile 2008, "Uncle" Bob Martin proposed a fifth value to the Agile Manifesto:

Craftsmanship over crap.

I have an addition, too.

Ownership over authority.