Page 184 - Toyota Under Fire

RESPONSE AND THE ROAD TO RECOVER Y

all of these areas every year in the future. And, of course, the drop
in trust in Toyota was real and needed to be addressed, whether it
was based on truth, confusion, or fiction.

Phase III: Turning the Crisis
into an Opportunity

Even at the best of times, no one would have called Toyota a power-
house of public communications. In fact, arguably the most fre-
quent criticism of Toyota prior to 2009 was that the company
was too quiet and boring.
What Toyota does have is a powerful way of responding to
problems. The first question is always the same: “What is the
problem?” During the heat of the recall crisis, opinions on what
was the problem at Toyota were a dime a dozen. Plaintiffs’ lawyers
suggested that the problem was faulty electronics and a disregard
for customer safety; many columnists opined that the company
had grown too fast or that it had lost its focus on quality. Table
4.1 shows some of the problems that were suggested by pundits
and analysts and the symptoms that would have appeared if the
alleged problems had been real.
Improvement kaizen and turning the crisis into an oppor-
tunity for the company to improve are dependent on correctly
identifying the real problems, not just the problems presumed
by outside observers. Only then can the underlying root causes
of those problems be diagnosed, a necessary step before generat-
ing solutions. Akio Toyoda’s efforts to ensure that everyone in
the company was taking responsibility and turning his energy to-
ward continuous improvement would be useless if that effort was
directed at the wrong problems. If the problem really was a fun-
damental failure of the quality and safety culture at Toyota, that

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