Page 25 - Toyota Under Fire

PREF ACE

This is not to say that the Toyota Way evaporated from the
company. The culture was always alive and strong in most parts of
the company, but it needed to be awakened and raised to a higher
level, particularly in technical and administrative areas dealing
with translating customer complaints into improvements, re-
sponding to government concerns, and making recall decisions.
The Toyota Way is far more than a set of truisms at Toyota.
These improvements are exactly what we witnessed at Toyota
through these crises. You do not turn a culture off and on again
like a light switch. Toyota’s experience shows that with a strong
culture built over decades of living the values, these actions are
possible in the real world, even in a crisis, even while operating at
a $4 billion loss, and even while being falsely accused by the me-
dia and politicians of reckless disregard for customers.
We are grateful to Toyota for opening its doors and sharing
in great detail what it was doing to respond to the crisis. We were
consistently encouraged by Toyota to provide our own unbiased
interpretations about what we learned in a way that might benefit
other companies going through a crisis. We think there are les-
sons for every company and every manager in Toyota’s missteps
and successes. We’ve worked hard to tell the Toyota story with
candor, based on the facts, and with an eye toward what others
can learn about navigating through very rocky waters.
One quick note: we interviewed a wide variety of people in-
side and outside Toyota during our research. Any direct quotes in
the text, unless otherwise noted, are taken from those interviews.
In quotes translated from Japanese, we have taken the liberty of
lightly editing for grammar and clarity.
Jeffrey K. Liker, Ph.D.
Professor, Industrial and Operations Engineering,
University of Michigan; author, The Toyota Way

xxiv