One of my favorite articles on quality, similar to 'A Lesson Learned, A Lesson Forgotten'. See especially the Newport News Shipbuilding motto.
http://honoringhomer.net/
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000525.html
Stranger in a Strange Land How Homer Sarasohn Brought Industrial Quality to Japan and Why It
Took Japan So Long to Learn
....Working with Charles Protzman, an engineer from Western Electric who had been brought in to run the Japanese telephone system, Sarasohn wrote a textbook and prepared a syllabus for what they called the Civil Communication Section Management Seminar. It was a required seminar for senior electronics industry executives, meeting eight hours per day, four days per week for eight weeks. "The course was quality control, management concepts, and philosophy," Sarasohn remembered. "We'd ask them why their companies were in business, and they'd either look at us blankly or say that they were in business to make a profit, which was incorrect. The right answer was that they were in business to achieve some appropriate long-term goal, like taking the technical lead in manufacturing radio equipment. Unless you can come up with a reason, a motto, a clear statement of why you are in business, then you aren't in business. And we taught them that that motto had to be understood at all levels of the company." "The example we held up was Newport News Shipbuilding, whose motto was: 'We will build good ships here—at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships,'" Sarasohn said.
...Practically overnight, the Japanese electronics industry was born again, switching from maximizing production to maximizing yield. Suddenly, they understood in a way that they never had before the significance of Homer Sarasohn's lessons in product quality. It became essential to consider any process not as discrete elements but as a total system, and the way to maximize yields is not to aim for zero defects but for zero variation. If you control the production system and eliminate variation, then you don't even have to look for defects, because their won't be any. That's the only way to increase integrated circuit yields, no matter what country you work in, but it goes far beyond semiconductors to all areas of manufacturing. That's why Canon doesn't inspect its copiers and printers—because the variation is so low that inspection is a waste of time. That's what Homer Sarasohn was preaching in 1948, and what the Japanese electronics industry suddenly came to understand in 1968, when they went from talking about quality to doing something about it, because the alternative was failure. These lessons spread, 30 years after they had first been taught, first through the electronics industry in Japan and then to the automobile industry, which put them to good use.
If Toyotas are reliable, this is why.