Viewpoint — February 2010
"I love what you do for me, Toyota!"
Written by Bob Gershberg, Managing Partner Wray Executive Search
It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college. I was waiting tables at the local steakhouse (say it isn’t so!). Jackie with the pinkie ring and slightly gravelly voice called me into the cocktail lounge and said, “Hey Bobby, I found you a car.” I was never quite sure what Jackie did for a living, but knew well he was the guy to go to when you needed a car. “It’s a ’74 Toyota Corolla 5-speed, a repo with 1100 miles on it. Ya gotta pick it up in the Bronx tomorrow.” And so started my many year love affair with Toyota products. “Made in Japan” had a whole different meaning to my generation than it did to the generation past.
A brilliantly run company besting the Big Three in almost every category for so many years. Sales, customer satisfaction, consumer reports, profitability – they seemed invincible. Toyota’s handling of their recent problems is a story of how a long-trusted company lost sight of one of its core principles. In Toyota lore, the ultimate symbol of the company’s attention to detail is the “andon cord,” a rope that workers on the assembly line can pull if something is wrong, immediately shutting down the entire line. The point is to fix a small problem before it becomes a larger one. But in the broadest sense, Toyota itself failed to pull the andon cord on this issue, and treated a growing safety problem as a minor glitch, a point the company’s executives are now acknowledging in a series of humbling apologies.
The gravity of these safety issues is of course the potential loss of life. In the restaurant and food manufacturing industries, we too are charged with such immense responsibilities. All too often we are faced with the news of life-threatening foodborne illness. Crisis management is something we hope we never have to deal with. The ability and wisdom of leadership to immediately take responsibility and necessary action are the required mandate in order to successfully survive.
Toyota will carry on, but I suspect it will be a long time before we are professing, “Get the Feeling. Toyota.”
Bob Gershberg |Managing Partner|
bob.gershberg@dickwray.com
(888) 875-9993 ext 102
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