Avoiding the Toyota Crash
The debacle of Toyota continues to play out in the media. Today, the embattled car manufacturer once touted as the most successful in the world, is the subject of U.S. government safety investigations and numerous court cases. Toyota owners are suing over the loss of value of their vehicles and families are suing over the tragic loss of at last count 34 lives, involved in crashes attributed to unexplained acceleration problems. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict Toyota stands to lose billions of dollars, or that the global impact on the manufacturer will continue for years to come.
How could this have happened to the car manufacturer? Didn’t they develop their own “lean” manufacturing and production process which has been adopted by other corporate giants trying to emulate Toyota’s success? Didn’t Toyota have a book written about their corporate climb to success called The Toyota Way, which details the 14 management principles that drove them to the top of the heap of automobile manufacturers?
Despite developing corporate principles covering philosophy, people, process, and problems, Toyota fostered a culture that prevented reporting of the acceleration malfunctions. Toyota’s fall from grace can’t be attributed to just one thing. Instead it should be viewed as a series of events including:
- poor supplier control,
- lack of leadership,
- employing too many “yes” people,
- failing to see an automobile as the sum of its parts,
- human resources problems,
- procrastination, etc.
Intervention at a variety of individual points in the chain of events could have prevented this corporate train wreck. Unfortunately, in the words of an old Japanese saying, “The nail that stands out was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was pounded down to conform.”
