Thursday, July 12, 2012

Toyota's CEO discusses quality problems

In the July/August 2007 Harvard Business Review, Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe engages in a wide-ranging discussion of the company’s plans for the future.

It’s a fascinating article, and a couple of passages caught my eye in particular. In them, Mr. Watanabe frankly confronts problems that Toyota has faced on the quality of its automobiles:
In 1995 there were 26 Toyota factories; in 2007 there will be 63…. I realize that our system may be overstretched.

We must make that issue visible. Hidden problems are the ones that become serious threats eventually. If problems are revealed for everyone to see, I will feel reassured. Because once problems have been visualized, even if our people didn’t notice them earlier, they will rack their brains to find solutions to them.

Revealing the hidden problem, not tolerating the “quiet fix,” has been discussed in a prior post. But Mr. Watanabe goes on. He immerses himself in the company’s mistakes, and gets actively involved in diagnosing and fixing them. Says Mr. Watanabe:
Soon after I became president, as you know, we confronted several quality-related problems. We created teams specializing in different areas and instructed them to analyze the root causes of problems in each area. We found that in several cases the problems had occurred because of design flaws or because of short lead times that didn’t allow out engineers to build a sufficient number of physical prototypes. If we had thought about product designs more clearly or had the time to conduct more experiments, we could have avoided those problems.

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