Page 195 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

including customers and regulatory agencies. As Jim Lentz of
TMS put it:

I think the biggest issue is that everyone was so busy
chasing so many things at once that we were a little
blinded to really listening to the customers. Whether we
had a physical check sheet or whether we had a mental
check sheet in our mind, when we went out and spoke
to customers, we were listening only to have the custom-
ers answer questions on that check sheet. And as a result,
I think we were missing, in many cases, what the cus-
tomers were truly telling us.

To fully understand the actions that Toyota didn’t take that
helped the recall crisis snowball, and the steps that it has now
taken to improve and create future opportunity, we first have to
explain how Toyota is organized and how decisions on such issues
as safety, quality, and engineering were made before the crisis.

Organizational Structure
Toyota’s headquarters are in Toyota City. This isn’t a cute name
for the company’s headquarters, but the name of an actual city
where Toyota’s operations steadily grew as the company became
a global player. Toyota’s corporate headquarters, its research and
development operation, its Japanese manufacturing plants,
and even its primary suppliers are all based in or near Toyota City.
An exception to Toyota’s tightly integrated and colocated corpo-
rate structure was the original Toyota Motor Sales. After Toyota’s
near bankruptcy in 1950, the Japanese government forced Toyota
to reorganize into two separate companies, each headed by a non-

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