Page 24 - Toyota Under Fire

PREF ACE

Perhaps most unusual is who is doing all these things. It is
not the senior executives who at periodic crisis points turn the
company around. It is not the staff quality experts and engineers
who are figuring out how to solve the technical problems causing
defects. Too often, we think you can take a company that is in crisis
and turn it around simply by clearing out the old executives, bring-
ing in the new, and, perhaps, adding a new department of experts
on whatever caused the crisis. Top executives and staff departments
certainly play important roles, but to get to continuous improve-
ment, you need everyone to be both doing and thinking. In fact,
the people doing the value-added work are in the best position to
see and understand in detail the weaknesses and to find innovative
ways to improve the product and processes. We are talking about
the people who engineer and test the cars, those who build the
cars, those who sell the cars, the maintenance people who are see-
ing problems every day, the people in contact with government
agencies discussing whether to conduct a recall, and even the
people who are at the phones talking to customers with concerns.
It is the combined effort of hundreds of thousands of people
globally who are highly motivated and developed to check, ques-
tion, challenge, and improve that has made Toyota such a strong
competitor. This is what we mean by culture—the collective val-
ues in action on a daily basis throughout the company.
The motivation and skills to continuously improve are not ge-
netically inherited, but learned. All managers in Toyota are expected
to be teachers and to develop in their students the art of continuous
improvement. It is that culture of deeply training and developing
people that Akio Toyoda concluded had weakened as Toyota grew
so fast that there were not enough managers/teachers to go around
and too many new hires who had not gone through the long,
arduous process of becoming indoctrinated into the Toyota Way.

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