Mr. Akio Toyoda, President of the Toyota Motor Company has been embroiled in controversy and fingerpointing for several months now. Today he sits in front of a U.S. Congressional hearing to defend his company and protect its future. As a prelim to this event, Mr. Toyoda had an Op-Ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, titled Back to Basics for Toyota - it’s worth reading. If you’ve read my blog before and its numerous articles, its worth delving into Mr. Toyota’s position.
Mr. Toyoda’s Op-Ed piece is telling, because it gives us a peek into what he is thinking, and how Toyota will attempt to reinvent itself going forward. Therefore, I went through the article and did a simple word count for the words Safety, Quality and Transparency. This is what I found.
Safety: 10 times
Quality: 6 times
Transparency: 2 times
From this, it’s apparent that Safety is what is on the mind of Toyota’s customers and repairing the safety issue is “Job 1.” And the way to solving the safety issue (rebuilding trust) is through quality, which has historically been a core strength of Toyota. However the means to addressing the safety issue is by creating a culture of transparency. This is the feedback loop that enables Toyota’s engineers to design safer systems. Yet transparency is only listed twice. They are:
1st mention - 2nd paragraph: The first step is taking care of vehicles on the road today. But it also means making even safer vehicles in the future—and being more open and transparent about any safety issues that arise.
2nd mention - next to last paragraph: In short, I pledge that Toyota will set a new standard for transparency and speed of response on safety issues.
This Op-Ed piece focuses on safety and quality, and only touches on the issue of transparency. Yet as recent reports have implicated, its the transparency issue that is at the heart of the Toyota Safety and Quality problem. And the lack of transparency is directly tied to the Japanese culture, which it doesn’t address. How will Mr. Toyoda create a culture of transparency? What does this mean? What systems will be put in place? Without a culture of transparency, it suggests that Toyota is ripe for silent problems (problems that are being avoided, neglected, go about unnoticed or are being intentionally silenced) into the future.
Bottom Line: Toyota needs to implement processes and procedures to deal with the silent problems inside the Toyota organization. It’s interesting, they have the system in place in their manufacturing plants today, and is core to their historical strength in quality and safety. Now they need to implement a similar process inside the management and leadership ranks at Toyota. And as I noted in my book, silent problems can be the most destructive problems of all.
What do you think? Can Akio Toyoda do better?
Tags: Akio Toyoda, Quality, safety, Silent Problems, Toyota, Toyota quality, transparency
