Has Toyota Lost Its Quality Edge? Not So Fast February 17, 2010
Posted by Jeff Fuchs in automotive, Lean Thinking, manufacturing.Tags: automotive, Lean Thinking, manufacturing
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Critics of Toyota –from fellow automakers to the federal government –have been quick to pile on the Japanese auto manufacturer’s brake problems. But Jeffrey Liker, who has studied Toyota for more than 25 years between the United States, Europe, Japan, and other countries, says Toyota’s sixty years of operational and productive excellence shouldn’t just be thrown out the window. Toyota is already working on a fix for its brake problems –a fix that will take days, not weeks.
Check out the analysis here.
Jeff…your point about Toyota is true but I think they have damaged their brand. Other companies have recovered from even bigger problems.
This is an excerpt from a section on Toyota in my new book, ‘the Improvement Trap.’ Which will be published this Spring. I wrote the note last September. The book is a story about why most organizations do not improve their competitive position, even though they got better, after implementing improvement programs like: Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, etc.
Over the last 50 years Toyota has done some remarkable things from both a strategic perspective and in terms of systematic improvement. But their pursuit of becoming number one in the industry along with a few other problems have severely damaged the brand. Excerpt from the book…
“In the world today, Toyota may be experiencing some longer-term problems. It is much easier to be humble, when you are not #1! When you listen to Toyota senior executives over the last several years, there seems to be a degree of arrogance that was not there 10 years ago. Several executives we have heard speak about the executive mindset, the warrior culture, and Toyota’s superiority (in its improvement approach) to the rest of the world. When people talk like that, it would seem that the humility or humbleness that characterized Toyota for so long has evaporated. Not by every executive, for sure, but if a critical mass begins to feel that way, it creates openings for others–which is cool! It’s an opportunity, especially for the rest of the automotive industry, if Toyota competitors can radically change the way they operate. Akio Toyoda recently became CEO, partly to address these issues.”
Toyota has always been a highly arrogant company. You cannot become #1 in a industry or do what they did without a lot of arrogance. But they always balanced that arrogance with a very high degree of humility. Humility keeps one humble, if a company loses its humility…. in terms of improvement ….you start to lose that drive to get better. You begin to think, “You are so good, and you are better than everyone else!” Toyota led the automotive industry in terms of quality and its annual rate of improving the way they improved for more than 20 years.
But it has not been a truth over the last 10 or 15. Quality has improved significantly in the automotive industry. Honda certainly operates in a similar fashion to Toyota and managed to maintain a degree of humility. Nissan followed a different improvement pathway as did Hyundai, and their quality is comparable. The product quality of the traditional Big 3 in the US is very much the same as is also true with most manufacturers in Europe.
So what does Toyota have to be arrogant about? Hence the problems they are running into today. They will ultimately deal with the issue, but I’m not sure if they will dig down to the root causes that allowed this to happen.
It’s a bummer that the publishing industry moves so slowly. I wrote the above last Sept. I could have been seen as having so much insight….but alas….now I will simply be the 300th person commenting after the fact. Oh well so much for fame and glory. I do believe the rest of the book is pretty good, it’s my third one, but the first one I’m truly proud to have written. UhOh! That sounds a tad arrogant….I best go searching in my closet for some humility.