Page 244 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

When Liker visited Japan to do the interviews for this book, Akio
Toyoda made a point of telling the story (memorialized in the
Toyota museum) of his great-grandfather, Kiichiro Toyoda, tak-
ing personal responsibility for fixing a customer problem. One
day Kiichiro happened to drive by a broken-down Toyota truck.
He stopped, climbed under the truck, and helped the driver re-
pair it. Back at Toyota headquarters, he went to the engineering
department to explain the problem and give the engineers the task
of finding and fixing the root cause. Later, he went to the factory
to make sure that the fix had been properly implemented and that
no future Toyota vehicle would suffer the same problem. The point
of the story is not that senior executives should be climbing under
vehicles or replacing sticky pedals; it’s that everyone in Toyota, no
matter what level she is in the company, should take errors and de-
fects personally—and do everything she can to make sure that the
root cause is found and the problem fixed. A problem that affects a
Toyota customer is never “someone else’s problem.”
As soon as Akio Toyoda was appointed president, he began
preaching “back to the basics” and an intensified focus on gen-
chi genbutsu. He promised to be “the most active president in
Toyota history at the gemba.” He recognized that the company
had lost some of that deeply felt spirit of taking ownership of cus-
tomer problems as it grew to become a global powerhouse. He
saw the gap between the plans for regional self-reliance that had
been worked on for decades and the reality of leaders in Japan
having difficulty letting go, what he referred to as “micromanage-
ment.” He saw the fragmentation of the organizations in North
America, which meant that the critical connection in his grand-
father’s time—between caring for the customer, recognizing the
problem, taking immediate action, and following through to be
sure the customer concerns were solved—was weakened.

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