From www.washingtonpost.com : 'Toyota Way' lost on road to growth By Blaine Harden TOKYO -- Toyota separated itself from all other carmakers by immersing its workers in "the Toyota Way," a cult of quality and innovation that was painstakingly taught to new hires by experienced mentors. This article, from Saturday's Washington Post, gives a few specific theories as to how growth at Toyota led to problems. First, it says that new engineers were not mentored as well or as long as previously. Second, it says that engineers were overworked, and thus could not discover and repair errors as well as before. Third, it says they cut costs by cutting crash testing, etc. This article seems to be better than most at giving specific theories for what went wrong. I don't think Toyota is about to collapse, but what's happened in the past month or so makes Toyoda's earlier statement (reported in Dec. in the Economist) that the company is in the fourth stage of collapse make more sense than it did to many of us at the time.
I have sympathy for Toyota. Do you know how hard it is to determine the root cause of something that happens very rarely? With all the variables involved in reports coming from the field (weather, mileage, driver, road condition)? They probably needed to take the number of reports as a warning sign earlier (I heard the un-intended acceleration happens to all makes/models but Toys had the largest number of complaints by far). And the management probably got scared about such a massive recall - fearing exactly what has happened (overhyped dread and endless late night tv jokes). Maybe the lawyers or PR people have gotten too much sway at Toyota.
