Archive for March, 2010

Nobody can have missed the Toyota recall story. It was all over the media.

I watched Toyota President Akio Toyoda, (great grandson of the founder), testify in front of three Congressional Committees. I couldn’t help feel for him. After all, he was dragged in front of a braying audience of American congressmen in a country that was alien to him. Many would question the motives of the congressmen which probably had little to do with whether a Toyota Prius was going to stop when you hit the brakes and more to do with their personal profiles. I’m also sure that under the very conservative, considerate and polite nature of Japanese culture he would not have expected the same treatment at home. No wonder he looked nervous!

Something I have always instilled in my colleagues is that if something goes wrong, don’t dwell on it. Analyze what happened and try and understand why, take two or three learning points from the situation, learn from them and move on. I know it’s not always as clean cut as that but I have found it a good rule to follow over the years.

It takes me back to something I learnt back in the 90’s when I was working for a major retail bank. I was seconded to the Total Quality team for 18 months. Back then, Total Quality, or Total Quality Management (TQM) as it was commonly referred to, was all the rage. It was the latest management fad that was going to propel companies into a new era of harmony with ones customers and staff because everything would work as it was meant to. There were many gurus on the subject as their always are and my bank followed the teachings of Phillip Crosby, an ex ITT executive who had made a small fortune advising and guiding organizations through the TQM maze. He wrote a book called ‘Quality is Free’ in 1980. You couldn’t argue with much that Mr. Crosby preached as it was common sense – he just packaged it in a way that was easy for most of us to digest.

That said, part of his teaching which I have always followed is that organizations should adopt a ‘no blame culture’. The theory went that when something goes wrong in an organization, the tendency is for management to look for an individual or group onto which they can pin the blame. As we all know, that rarely resolves the problem. The reality is that when you analyze the cause of any failing, you begin to see that it is outdated processes, poor education and antiquated working practices that usually cause the errors. The individual is just a cog in the corporate machine and will keep doing the same thing, regardless of whether it’s right for the organization or not, until the process is changed. Crosby also taught that the best positioned individuals in an organization capable of identifying how processes should be changed are not the highly skilled and highly paid executives but the guy who works the process everyday and usually takes the flack from customers when things go wrong. Give him the right education and tools and he will come up with a solution. How many times have you heard in a store, at the airport or in a hotel when something goes wrong – ‘I’m just doing my job. What they need to do is x but who am I to tell them?’

 So going back to Mr. Toyoda, sure Toyota is going to suffer some reputation and market share damage over the short to medium term but it’s a strong and respected business and I don’t doubt it will recover. As for those Congressmen in Washington, they might think they have the right man but they haven’t. In fact, there isn’t a right man. Something is wrong with the processes in Toyota and I have every confidence they will work with their employees to find a solution.

It won’t stop me smiling at the bumper sticker I saw recently. ‘If you can read this and are driving a Toyota, you’re too close. Try your brakes’.

Steve