Can Toyoda Navigate Back to the Toyota Way?

Yesterday the Finnish Broadcasting Company showed a BBC feature Total Recall: The Toyota Story on Toyota's current huge problems on reputation and quality mostly related to the deadly accidents caused by "sudden unintended acceleration" problems with Toyota and Lexus vehicles.

The presentation of the Toyota Way and the Toyota Production System (TPS) would be good material for any introductory course on Your Toyotaish Method Of The Day. It goes in some ten minutes through the basic concepts: genchi genbutsu or "go and see", chosen meaning challenge or long term vision, teamwork, sonkei soncho or respect and humility and finally kaizen or continuous improvement. There is also about the history of the TPS showing how it was actually innovated from seeing the US grocery store chain Piggly Wiggly and how it operated with minimum inventory and a Just In Time system. Not to forget the hilarious company videos.

Rest of the programme is mostly on whether the Toyota was in the know of the problems with sudden unintended acceleration and hiding the problems or not. But there is also some analysis on the reasons why Toyota faced these problems. The biggest mistake seems to be changing the chosen of manufacturing the best quality cars to ruling the market and maximizing growth which resulted in some very basic mistakes all the LeanBanGuard consultants out there lecture about:

• Toyota started to look for cheaper unit costs with parts subcontractors in order to cut those costs by 30% and resulting in poor quality using subcontractors not up to the standards of the long term partners it had been using for decades.
• Toyota wanted to hugely grow volumes (increase velocity if you want) but had to trade its principles of "go and see" and kaizen for that.

So it seems that Toyota has a sudden intended acceleration problem to fix and it has to navigate back to the sustainable pace of the original Toyota Way. This feels very familiar to me as it seems this has happened in my IT endeavors more than often. Not that I have ever been on the right path myself. But maybe with some more genchi genbutsu and kaizen I'll get there some day.

(If you are in Finland you can catch the show in Yle Areena for some more days)