Page 266 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

A Final Lesson

Toyota’s resilience in the face of two major crises in three years
has been remarkable. Despite plunging demand, first from the
Great Recession and then from the recall crisis, the company has
restored profitability and clawed back most of its retail market
share, both globally and in the United States. But the real out-
come has yet to be written. Toyota’s reputation has been pulled
down so that it no longer holds a dominant position, but is just
another of the companies scraping for a piece of the pie. The final
judgment on Toyota’s response to the crises will be written over
the next 10 years as Toyota works to regain its sterling reputation
and again become a role model for companies throughout the
world. That’s the vantage point from which we can judge whether
Toyota used the crisis to truly become a better and a stronger
company than it was in the past—that is, after all, the metric that
Toyota has always used to measure its response to a crisis.
Admittedly, these were the biggest crises that Toyota has
faced since World War II. But the philosophy is the same today
as it was for Taiichi Ohno: you must drain the water to see the
problems and then fix them in pursuit of perfection. Jim Lentz,
president of TMS, used that very analogy:

As we went through this [crisis], and the water level
dropped, we started noticing some of the rocks that had
been there all the time, but they were kind of hidden by
success and by a big marketplace. So, I guess, in the long
run, going through all this is a good thing, because we’re
able to assess what the problems are, make sure we have
the right processes in place, make sure we’re developing

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