Page 132 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

This desire to achieve self-reliance, coupled with a rock-solid
commitment to ensuring that Toyota culture is deeply embedded
in every leader, is perhaps the central management tension that the
company has been facing for the last 20 years. The North American
action plan based on Global Vision 2010 made self-reliance one of
its core goals. Yet in 2009, major decisions on engineering, safety,
and recalls were still being made almost exclusively in Japan, not in
the affected region. Just as important, recall decisions, separated as
they were from the region, were based primarily on the input of en-
gineers who did not have direct access to customer feedback. Toyota’s
culture of fact-based decision making, which has served it so well,
essentially excluded from consideration customer complaints or cus-
tomer sentiment, relying almost entirely on engineering judgments.

The Sticky Pedal Recall
It was not until mid-January 2010 that the engineering executives
who deal with safety and recalls in Japan fully informed the exter-
nal affairs executives who were responsible for communications
in the United States about the technical details of the sticky pedal
problem and the findings in Europe and how they related to the
cases reported in the United States. The American executives,
as most famously expressed by communications manager Irv
Miller, who wrote that the company needed to “come clean” in
an e-mail on January 16 (see The “Smoking Guns” That Weren’t
on page 102), realized that the media environment demanded
a fully detailed public announcement as soon as possible, while the
Japan-based executives, who did not consider the sticky pedals to
be a safety defect, felt there was no urgent need to issue a recall
or make technical details public. While internal debate contin-
ued about exactly when the announcement would be made and

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