All Posts Tagged With: "Toyota"
The Real Heroes
Toyota’s front-page fall-from-grace has rivaled that of Tiger Woods, a business world parallel to the sporting world’s latest scandal. No wonder. Our business publications, from BusinessWeek to Fortune to Fast Company to the Wall Street Journal, weave their stories around the companies and executives who have risen to the top today. It is a cult of personality, no different than the teams and stars in the athletic world or the TV shows and actors in the entertainment world. We read about a company’s breakthrough performance or an executive’s startling turnaround and we place them on a pedestal and feel betrayed when they fall off.
They always do, of course. No company or leader can sustain performance excellence indefinitely. There are Baldrige Award winners that have failed after they received the Award, but so what? The Baldrige Award doesn’t guarantee unending success. It simply recognizes that, in the year it was received, that organization was one of the best-run organizations in the country. Next year, who knows? It’s like winning the Super Bowl one year (not that I’d know what that’s like, living in Minnesota) and expecting to win it next year and the year after, ad infinitum.
We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Baldrige Award winners have a lot to teach us about designing, managing, and improving effective processes in all areas of a management system. They have the results that show how well those processes work. We can learn from them. There’s nothing special about them. Their leaders are no more brilliant than your…
24Feb2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedToyota’s Strategic Challenge
The automotive industry is a great example of what happens when a few competitors gain a strategic advantage by setting a high standard in a critical area. Toyota and Honda have been the quality leaders for more than two decades, attracting car buyers who had been Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler customers but who wanted better reliability in their vehicles. Toyota rode its quality wave to worldwide leadership in car sales, only to slip at the same time competitors’ quality matched and even surpassed it.
The Economist recently described the problems Toyota faces and how it is addressing them (“Losing Its Shine,” December 10, 2009). While the company seems to have fixed its quality issues—Toyota had 18 of the 48 leading vehicles in the recent Consumer Reports reliability study—quality is no longer a big differentiator in the automobile industry. Instead, Toyota’s “vehicles will inevitably be judged increasingly on more emotional criteria, such as styling, ride, handling, and cabin design.”
Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder and its president since June, recognizes the need for innovative design. He recently said, “I want to see Toyota build cars that are fun and exciting to drive.”
That may be a challenge. Toyota’s value proposition has been built upon quality and reliability. Its culture, defined by the Toyota Production System, completely supports that value proposition. Steering in a new direction using a system developed for a different purpose will prove difficult.
That’s the strategic challenge Toyota faces. It has set the standard for quality and reliability in its industry and…
17Dec2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedLearning, Teaching and Benchmarking
“Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?” asks business strategist Gary Hamel. Bill Taylor quotes Hamel in a thought-provoking article, “The Rise of the Teaching Organization” (HarvardBusiness.org, November 17, 2009). Taylor takes it a step further, stating “that the most determined innovators—the organizations with the most original ideas about how to compete and win—aren’t just committed to learning. They are just as committed to teaching.”
There’s ample evidence of that among Baldrige Award recipients. All winners are required to share information on their performance and strategies with other U.S. organizations. Many provide tours and offer workshops for interested leaders and use those workshops to identify best practices in other organizations. Several have formed consulting organizations to provide further support. They are teaching and, in the process, they are learning.
Taylor describes how Virginia Mason, a Seattle-based hospital system, became a healthcare leader by integrating the Toyota Production System. Last year, it created the Virginia Mason Institute to do what Baldrige Award recipients do: conduct tours, explain how they work, and share what they know. Its CEO, Dr. Gary Kaplan, said, “Part of our mission as a company is to help improve our industry. But the more we educate, the faster we move as well. This will spur us on, push us to keep getting better, and people will chase our taillights. Our credibility as a company is dependent on our ability to deliver results. By teaching others what we’ve learned, it forces us to keep learning.”
Organizational learning is a Baldrige…
23Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
