Year in and year out, cars manufactured by Toyota Motor Corp. are praised by automobile critics and lauded by loyal customers. The cars sell extraordinarily well and, come year's end, can almost always be found at the top of the rankings in reliability, quality and customer satisfaction.

What's Toyota's secret?

Surprisingly, says Gerry Keim, it's not engineering.

"You look at a company like Toyota, which outperforms every other automobile maker every year, and it's really not the engineers," says Keim, a professor of management at the W. P. Carey School of Business and associate dean of the W. P. Carey MBA. "They've been reverse-engineering [those processes] for 20 years in Detroit, but they can't recreate the products. It's really about the 'Toyota way' -- and that's a much more complicated system than engineering."

Understanding the 'Toyota way,' says Keim, means understanding the company's highly complex, and highly successful, corporate culture. It's a culture that has helped Toyota excel in technology, sales and marketing, and become the most respected automaker in the world. It's also a culture that did not develop by accident: The company's leaders made it happen.