This is a dark day for management journalism. Everybody’s favourite case-study, Toyota, has been hit by severe technical problems. Some of their accelerator pedals are not working properly. And this from the ultimate Total Quality Management company, the Kaizen Queen, the zero defect champions.
So: they are human after all. They have pushed too hard for growth, cut costs too aggressively, and paid the price. This is not the Toyota way.
But Akio Toyoda, the company’s chief executive, is on the case. He has declared that Toyota has fallen into the trap described so well by Jim Collins in his latest book How The Mighty Fall. Toyota has strayed, and engaged in the “undisciplined pursuit of more”, as Collins, and Toyoda, have put it.
You can read more about this story in Saturday’s FT. In the meantime, the search for the perfect management case-study continues.
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Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
