It’s conventional wisdom that the pharma and biopharma could learn a lot from the automotive, aerospace and electronics businesses. I’ve already goofed on Airbus’ Supply Chain of Fools (see the May 2008 edition of this column) and those criticisms – and more! – could just as easily be applied to Boeing’s outsourcing practices for its 787 Dreamliner project. Similarly, it’d be quite easy to take shots at, say, Microsoft, which once bragged in the cover feature of a consumer magazine that it outsourced 100% of the manufacturing for the XBox . . . and was losing $100 per unit sold. I guess a negative lesson is still a lesson.

Thanks to recent gas-pedal engineering flaws and possible software glitches with its more advanced braking systems, Toyota has become the latest object lesson in . . . well, no one’s quite sure what, yet. It may be that Toyota spread its supply chain too thin in its quest to beat GM in market share. It may be that engineers “over-engineered” the pedals and forgot that most drivers aren’t engineers. It may be that federal agencies shouldn’t rely so much on their subjects to self-report (although I’m loath to recommend expanding any government agency). And it may be that computerized braking systems are as susceptible to crashes (as it were) as any other computerized object in your life.

Those are only proximate effects. The bigger lesson, according to Edward Niedermayer of The Truth About Cars, is that Toyota c. 1993-94 got caught up in a vicious cycle of Lean that led to “decontenting,” or removing variation among products in order to cut costs and improve efficiencies. One of the results, he contends, was the “value engineering” that weeded out the “overquality” of Toyota’s products.

The takeaway, in my book, is actually an out-take from this issue’s Newsmakers conversation with Tony Maddaluna of Pfizer Global Manufacturing. “When we sell Pfizer’s product, we sell Pfizer’s reputation,” said Mr. Maddaluna. He then repeated the well-worn wisdom that a good reputation takes a lifetime to build but no time at all to destroy.

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But other people take different lessons from these industries, I suppose. In a Feb. 24 BusinessWeek article, Eli Lilly’s Drug Assembly Line, I learned that the executives at Lilly are inspired enough by the auto industry that they plan to “turn drug development into something akin to automobile manufacturing – an assembly line of tasks that work in concert to make the final product quickly and efficiently.”

Under other circumstances, I’d chalk this up to reportorial inexperience with pharma, but one of the two BW writers involved in the piece is a veteran pharma writer, so I’m going to have to assume that Eli Lilly wants to model drug development after a process that has been pilloried for quality issues in recent months and previously was notable for its need to keep producing units despite the collapse of all markets for its products.

Actually, I was disheartened from the very beginning of the Lilly article, which detailed how chief executive officer John Lechleiter gave senior executives a digital clock that counts down the time until Zyprexa loses its patent protection (and most of its $5 billion in annual sales). Emblazoned on the clock, we learn, are the words, “Do what we do.”

I suppose “Do what we do” is a marginally less responsibility-abdicating slogan than one of my most hated phrases, “It is what it is,” but neither one is exactly going to fire up the troops to go discover the next wave of drugs that’ll replace Lilly’s soon-to-fall-off-the-patent-cliff batch.

As it turns out, the method of inspiring them is to, um, tell them to drop everything and just work on this one thing:

Gil Y. Roth has been the editor of Contract Pharma since its debut in 1999.