ft.com/gapperblog

I went to a media breakfast in Detroit this morning hosted by Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota’s president. He is an engaging character: extremely cheerful, with a mischievous sense of humour. But it also struck me that Toyota must be a tough company for which to work.

That is not because it is dysfunctional but exactly the opposite: it is so relentless and self-critical in its pursuit of higher quality and lower costs that I felt tired just listening to him. A gleam came into his eye as explained how he has tried to eradicate Toyota’s recent quality problems with vehicles including its new Texas-made Tundra pick-up truck.

He was prompted by a question about whether Toyota was growing so fast that it was placing more demands on its suppliers than they could cope with. "Whenever any problem arises, we will not regard it as something that suppliers are responsible for," he said firmly. "They are all Toyota’s problems."

He went on to give a textbook explanation of the famed Toyota Manufacturing System. You know the one. Everyone is responsible for defects, when a problem is spotted the whole line stops, allowing everyone to focus on the quality problem and eliminate it etc.

I have read about it in books including The Machine That Changed the World but it was obvious, listening to Mr Watanabe, that he lives and breathes it. Indeed, nothing excites him as much as discussing it. The thing he kept emphasising internally, he said, was that each employee has to think about how his or her task fits with the workflow - the tasks that precede and follow it.

By way of example, he proceeded to explain how the principles of the Toyota system applied to journalism. A reporter has to think about how best to gather information and then, when writing an article, how to make it so good that the editor next in line does not need to correct it much. That was how Toyota managed to  reduce costs and improve quality - by making things right first time.

I reached two conclusions. First, the Columbia School of Journalism would face stiff competition if Toyota went into the business. Second, Mr Watanabe may be amiable but he is demanding. Masatami Takimoto, Toyota’s head of research and development, who was also there, testified that Mr Watanabe likes to set dates for projects to be completed but always adds "or as soon as possible".

January 14th, 2008 in Uncategorized | Permalink