Page 256 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

be able to hit the ground running should they decide to join Toy-
ota after graduation.
Still, despite the progress that Toyota has made, the balance
between centralized and decentralized, global and local, is even
harder than most people think (and most people think it’s very
hard). Toyota’s commitment to a specific culture has positives and
negatives in that regard. The clarity of its values and its culture
is absolutely essential to enabling the inculcation of that cul-
ture across national boundaries. On the other hand, the expec-
tation that everyone in the company will rigorously learn and
internalize the culture, no matter where she is or what her prior
background may be, requires massive investment. Toyota cannot
simply hire new people and delegate; it needs to first spend time
and money to grow the Toyota culture in every employee. The
tension at Toyota is captured in the commitment to the culture
and the fact that the culture includes the value of genchi genbutsu.
There is an inherent demand here that especially the people who
are at the margins, at the periphery of the organization, be deeply
steeped in the culture, and that they are to be trusted to make de-
cisions because they are at the gemba.
One of the factors that has been identified as a root cause of
the recall crisis was overly centralized decision making. The rea-
sons that those decisions were centralized make a lot of sense,
and there are obvious dangers in the regionalization strategy that
Toyota has chosen to pursue coming out of the crisis. Typically
you don’t fix information flow problems by decentralizing. You
bring the people who are involved in a decision closer together. In
other words, you centralize the function. What Toyota has done
instead is put pressure on its commitment to inculcating its cul-
ture deeply everywhere. If it doesn’t succeed in that challenge,
then regional decision making on design, engineering, and safety

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