Page 250 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

During the recall crisis, many commentators suggested that
Toyota’s rapid growth was at fault, leading to breakdowns in safety
and quality. Even Akio Toyoda has suggested that the company
grew too fast. As we’ve illustrated through the data, there’s little
evidence of the purported decline in quality or concern for safety
at Toyota. So what did Toyoda mean when he stated that the
company may have grown too fast? “The problem was that
the pace of growth was faster than the pace of human resource
development. . . . It is not the growth pace itself, but it is the rela-
tion between the pace of growth and the pace of people develop-
ment,” he told us.
Toyota was certainly growing rapidly during the 2000s, more
rapidly than the company’s ability to keep up its patient approach
to developing people within the Toyota Way, and teaching TPS
and TBP by giving people mentoring and opportunities to prac-
tice problem solving. Toyoda noted how impatience played a role
in the cultural breakdown and contrasted it to his experience be-
ing trained at an organization set up by Taiichi Ohno:

The process of arriving at the root cause when I was on
the staff of OMCD [Operations Management Consult-
ing Division] took me about two months. But the person
just above me, he was able to get the root cause in two
weeks. But if you go to a higher level of expertise, the head
of OMCD, he could get the answer within two minutes.
The problem, however, is that . . . when people are work-
ing under the pressure of time, the mentors are irritated,
and mentors would give the answer to the juniors. But
you have to differentiate, depending on the matura-
tion of the trainee; sometimes you have to give him two
months so that he can arrive at the true cause on his own.

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