Toyota is Smart Enough to Stick with What Works, Right?

I don't believe Toyota is foolish enough to have "dramatically changed the way the company is managed." If so Toyota will suffer and the big 3 will be given their chance to dominate once again.

Akio Toyoda: Toyota's comeback kid paints the typical American magazine picture of radical CEO doing radical things to shake up company and general be heroic.  They don't seem to like to say, Toyota refocused on what has made it great for decades.  They updated a few things to deal with the current state of the company.  And they will continue to do use thee same great management concepts they did for the last 30 years for the next 30.  And American executives don't want to be seen that way - they want to be portrayed as heros.  Hopefully Akio Toyoda hasn't adopted that narcissistic tendency from his American peers.

I imagine (and hope) that it is just like all the stories talking about the Toyota crisis that wasn't.  The story of Toyota has been great management for 50 years.  They haven't been so foolish as to drop that at any other time.  I doubt Akio Toyoda is that foolish today.

Yes, Toyota needs to constantly question if they are failing to perform as they should, if they are slipping...  And they need to constantly improve not just the factory but the management processes.  Doing so is not dramatically changing, that is continuing what has been done.

American companies are so concerned with financial rewards and making themselves seem like heros they have to present everything as dramatic changes.  If Akio Toyoda has fallen to that American narcissistic disease Toyota's long term future is no better than any other car companies (and worse than Honda's).  But I don't think Toyota or Toyoda are that foolish.

As I said a few years ago, and still believe, Toyota's crisis was not a crisis.  Toyota did seem to slip a bit in trying to get away with shortcuts to quick results.  It was a fairly minor slip and all they needed to do was return to what had worked so well for decades.

Related: Toyota Stops Lines – Lots of Lines - Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership - Toyota Execution Not Close to Being Copied

Comment on the post from Jeff Liker:

I met with Akio Toyoda twice for a total of 4 hours and have been watching his actions closely. His philosophy is very simple:  "back to the basics of the Toyota Way."  That is all he says and all he does.  On the other hand he believes Toyota has become too bureaucratic and needs more regional autonomy and more entrepreneurial-like innovation.  In the Toyota Way 2001 they cite his Great, Great grandfather, Sakichi Toyoda, as saying: 'it is a big world out there, open the window."

So Akio Toyoda has taken actions to open up the company more to the outside world, including various partnerships, and a more intense focus on listening to the customer and innovating to stay ahead of the competition.  He also learned in the recall crisis that Toyota was slow to respond to media attacks and thus in some cases needs faster decision making leading which led to cutting the board of directors in half…. A good thing for Toyota in my view.

I do believe Toyota could do a better job of listening to the customer.  A big part of customer issues is the very customer unfriendly dealer process - pricing based on how foolish or lazy the customer is.  I doubt Toyota is willing to try and tackle this though.  It is easier to let the customer lose and keep the politicians happy.  Politicians are paid a great deal by dealers to create legal framework that makes it very hard for car companies to provide make customers value the top priority.  The dealers essentially pay politicians to allow dealers to prosper at the expense of customers; the business practices that close to noone would say are in citizen's interests.  Yes it is hard to deal with this.  Toyota has been doing what it can to accept the current system and reduce some of the negative impacts on customers.  But it is still the most obvious area of significant systemic failure to customers I believe.

I think the bureaucratic issues do need to be addressed.  And increasing the speed at which strategic/critical decisions get made is wise.  Opening up to the outside world is wise.  It is also dangerous if you start accepting the latest fads without thinking.  Obviously no-one intentionally does this.  But it happens a great deal.

Customer Un-service by Automakers

Why The ‘Check Engine’ Light Must Be Banned

all the average motorist sees is that little drawing of an engine bisected by a lightning bolt. And all that tells them is basically nothing. ... the state of things now is that your car actually could do more than just throw an error code at consumers. It contains an advanced system to diagnose itself, but the actual information from that diagnosis is not available to the car's owner; the average owner must pay a dealer or mechanic to provide him or her with the codes, and what those codes mean. This is absurd. Early on, when in-dash displays were rare, one could understand why cars didn't just display what codes were being thrown (though I think a little in-dash receipt-type printer would have been cool). But today's dash displays capable of displaying text, or at a minimum numerical codes, have been commonplace in cars for at least a decade.

Exactly right.

Which is why we need a federal mandate that bans the generic "check engine" light in new cars and instead requires, on dash, OBD-II codes and a basic description.

I can understand thinking this based on the extremely poor record of manufacturers. How is this not done already? Seems very similar to their fighting air bags for decades before adding them under federal mandate. And then finding out drivers like safety and advertising about their air bags. With such past evidence I can understand thinking the manufactures are too out of touch to improve without federal mandates. Toyota, Honda, Ford, Volvo... please do what would have been the right thing a decade ago and make your diagnostics useful for customers. Don't require us to suffer until we finally have to get the government to do what you should have done years ago. I suppose maybe two million sensors on a crash test dummy helps (as Lexus keeps spouting in ads). Though I must admit it sounds an awful lot like hype, rather than valuable engineering info. I can't imagine that more than 80% of your customers would care much more about useful information from the diagnostics in their car, than flashy dummies. I find it hard to believe you get valuable information about car design from that many censors. A higher number isn't better if it doesn't translate into better design. If it does, great, we still want to know what is wrong with our car. I would think some manufactures have already done the right thing, but I don't know who. Add comments, if you know. Related: Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search - Making Life Difficult for Customers - Good Customer Service Example

Lying with Statistics

Response to: Great example of "Lying with Statistics"

My view is closer to Rip's.  Deceiving people is not alleviated by being "truthful" but misleading.  As with many things where you draw the border is often challenging.  I do like putting the claims of lying on a person - not on data.  Data can be wrong.  It can't lie.  People can lie.  People can also mislead.  And very often people can be mislead (by those intending to mislead them and those that failed to understand the data in the first place and then used the data in a faulty way to support their mistaken notion).

Those of us reading the messages in this group (statistics group on LinkedIn) are not likely to fall into the being mislead camp often.  But my experience is that is by far the biggest problem.  People not having numeracy and being mislead all the time do to their lack of understanding (either intentionally, or through ignorance of theirs [or the person presenting the info to them]).

Related:  Bigger Impact: 15 to 18 mpg or 50 to 100 mpg? - Understanding Data -

Preaching False Ideas to Men Known to be Idiots

Avoid Bad Technology Non-Solutions Using Agile and PDSA

Automation is Not Always the Answer, in Retail or Healthcare

I’m not anti-technology. I just believe strongly in the “Toyota Way” principle that states: “Use Only Reliable, Thoroughly Tested Technology That Serves Your People and Processes”

Very good post. I am a big proponent of technology. My career path was basically from helping management improve organizational performance to IT program manager doing that same thing. I did that because there were so many opportunities to improve using technology.

But there are big problems. Many technology solutions are lousy. If people applied PDSA thinking they would be much better off. agile software development does this to a reasonable degree (I think they could do more in that vein but it is decent now). A big reason I moved into technology myself was because getting IT solutions implemented properly (even half way decently) was nearly impossible. And this is true all over.

If you use PDSA, systems thinking (Deming's view not computer systems) and agile software development methods you will avoid the all too common technology messes and instead take advantage of technology. You also need people that have the right skills and knowledge - knowing how to use technology properly seems to be less common that you would think given all the technology around us.

Related: Involve IT Staff in Business Process Improvement - Information Technology and Business Process Support

History, ASQ and the Future

The Past, The Future, Quality, and ASQ

does the quality community bear some responsibility for making sure its philosophic foundations are not lost to history?

Managers fail to adopt old, proven ideas.  I blame, mostly, managers themselves for this.  Organizations, like ASQ, should also do a much better job, too.  Unfortunately, ASQ has a long way to go in promoting quality.  Huge amounts of historical content is locked away, hidden from the open internet.  Also, I agree with Steve Prevette's comments (Aug 24th comment), in my experience in dealing with ASQ (and watching from afar for years now) there is far too much attention on growing revenue and far to little on promoting good management practices.  That isn't that surprising for a bureaucracy.  They often turn to attempts to grow revenue (and often promotions, bonuses...) over any mission the organization has.

It makes perfect sense for ASQ to focus on the mission and seek revenue to allow greater reach.  I'm sure that is how ASQ wants to see the last few decades.  I don't see it that way, but I doubt that matters much.

I'll actually give ASQ's web presence a good review over the next few weeks.  I haven't paid much attention in a few years and it is good too see if ASQ has started to take providing good content online seriously every few years (but from 1995-2009 I never found much good being done, sadly - the potential is huge for ASQ but it has not been a priority from what I can tell).  At the same time I monitor what is going with management online pretty heavily and find extremely few references to ASQ material in all the content I review (which is not a good sign for ASQ).
I hope ASQ puts promoting better management as the aim and re-orients their actions based on that primary aim, but I am not optimistic. I have seen, for too long, the seeming focus being on maintaining and growing the organization ASQ and selling quality management related material as the means to that end.

Some past, related posts by me: - Classic Management Theories are Still Relevant - Data Based Blathering - ASQ and ACSI - Early History of Quality Management Online

Zipcar: Systems Improvement

Zipcar Customer Experience: Variability, Utilization, and Queueing

Late returning of cars appears to be a problem and long-standing theme with Zipcar. In fact, for late returning cars, the customer is charged a substantial late fee of $50. With such a high late fee rate, one can only surmise that late returning cars is a large enough of a problem and Zipcar’s response to this is to change the behavior with a large penalty.

Good stuff. Without knowing the situation (myself) couldn't a high late fee be the solution? The high late fee makes those renting cars very likely to return them on time to avoid the fee. It isn't clear if you have data that the high late fee is just a penalty that doesn't make the system perform better or not (to me reading this anyway). I agree, I think zipcar is an interesting innovation. It would seem to me real time (internet enabled communication) would help a great deal - notify of bottleneck, report cars needing service, tell user that car is late but these 5 nearby location have a car... Some of this is just trying to make the problem have a lessor negative impact.

I really like innovative ideas like zipcar especially that find solutions that are more efficient. Zipcars can reduce the waste of cars sitting around unused in millions of driveways.

Related: Zipcar Innovation (2008) - Traffic Congestion and a Non-Solution - Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search

Stop Letting Technical People Get Away With Social Ineptitude

Stop Letting Technical People Get Away With Social Ineptitude

it’s often believed to be true because there are so many engineers and technical personnel with poor people skills. I never have seen statistics to support the notion that the ratio is higher in these professions than in others, yet employers often find that people filling these roles with poor people skills are still employable. This needs to stop.
I’m of the opinion that every position is customer-facing.

It seems fine to me to wish everyone you hire is strong at every aspect of work. I think it is a bit unrealistic but maybe my standards are too low (this is the opposite of what most people find who know me though). It seems to me people that are very skilled (have skills that are not easily found) have leeway to do poorly in other areas and still be a net gain to the employer. This is true for divas, athletes and technical people. There are lots of technical people that are great working with people. My experience though, is you often have trouble finding only them for every single technical job (though I am sure the more demand there is for working at your organization the more possible it becomes).

My belief is most technical people could be better in this way if they wanted to. They just can get away without and so do. yeah it isn’t great, but the real world often has things that are not as the “should be.” If you want to work at Trader Joe’s and want to be anti-social they can just move on to the next person and find plenty of people that are great with people and have all the skills they need.

One thing that comes into play also is the desire of technical people (and academics) to challenge ideas and pick at weaknesses. This is a very beneficial trait. Some people can’t distinguish criticism of ideas and being mean to people. It is not wise to set a standard where people taking offense to ideas being criticized is protected over sensible critical discussion of ideas.

I do agree with your mindset, I just think a bit more flexibility may be warranted. I would agree the corporate culture should be one that expects and coaches everyone to customer friendly and that works well with others.

Related: Understanding How to Manage Geeks - Respect People by Creating a Climate for Joy in Work - Respect for People – Understanding Psychology - The Manager FAQ

Experimenting to Discover

Causal Reasoning in Science: Don’t Dismiss Correlations (the broken link was removed)

Box, Hunter, and Hunter were/are theorists, in the sense that they don’t do experiments (or even collect data) themselves.
...
Science is about increasing certainty — about learning. You can learn from any observation, as distasteful as that may be to evidence snobs. By saying that experiments are “necessary” to find out something, Box et al. said the opposite of you can learn from any observation.

William Hunter was my father. He did many experiments. George Box did many experiments. You are entitled to your opinions obviously but the claim that they only dealt with other people's data is not accurate. It is true they were world renowned experts on experimenting and had many people consult them about their experiments, for help: designing them, analyzing them, what to do next, how to improve the process of experimentation in their organization, etc.. While it seems to be implied in the post that such consultation was a reason to distrust their thoughts on experimentation I hardly think that is a sensible conclusion to draw. Most of those they helped were running experiments in industry, to improve results (not to publish papers).

They were, and are, applied statisticians (and though I am obviously biased, I think many would agree, 2 of the most accomplished in that field in the 20th century). What experiments need to be done is critical for an applied statistician. What matters is making improvement in real world processes. If you don't run the right experiments, you won't learn things to help you improve.

They worked on the problem of where to focus, in order to learn, quite a bit. One significant part of there belief was to have those involved in the work do the thinking about what needed to be improved. This isn't tremendously radical today but in the past you had many people that thought "workers" should do what the college graduates in their office at headquarters tell them to do. Here is one of many such example, from Managing Our Way to Economic Success by William Hunter:

The key is that employees at all levels must have appropriate technical tools so that they can do the following things:

- recognize when a problem has arisen or an opportunity for improvement exists,
- collect relevant data,
- analyze the situation,
- determine whose responsibility it is to take further action,
- solve the problem or refer it to someone more appropriate...

I don't have the book in front of me, but doesn't it start with an example on learning where you can use inductive reasoning and from the facts that you see you can draw conclusions and construct a theory that fits the facts. If so, it seems to call into question the idea that they claimed "[the] opposite of you can learn from any observation." is not actually accurate. They understood you can use inductive reasoning to create theories. You then use experiments to test theories.

The books is called Statistics for Experimenters, right? Not statistics for drawing conclusions when not doing experiments. When you are experimenting you can test whether beliefs you have are accurate and you can learn about things you try. Smart people can make guesses what will happen and be right. I know the authors would believe those knowledgable about the system in question are well suited to determine what variables to test. It is that knowledge that will lead to experiments that are likely to be effective.

The authors of the book were trying to help those that often failed to learn as much from experiments as they could. Far too many people still don't use the most effective statistical tools when experimenting.

They emphasized, consistently, the need for those doing the work to involved in the experiments. The job of statisticians was to help in the cases where advanced statistical tools and knowledge would be useful. The reason for those who do the work (are familiar with the process) is because they have knowledge to bring to what should be tried in experiments.

When I read through The Scientific Context of Quality Improvement, 1987 by George Box and Soren Bisgaard it seems to me it discusses the types of issues you raise: how do we learn without experimenting? I am not sure if it is just me, or if it clearly addresses that issue. Here is another, Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning by Scientific Method by George E. P. Box. And another, Statistics for Discovery.

There are many other sources, I am sure. They understood the importance of learning as much as you could from available sources. They just also understood the importance of experiments and learning the most you could from experiments. And the book, Statistics for Experimenters, was focused on the most effective ways to improve using statistics to learn from experiments..

Here is what Box, said in his own words about the objective (and it isn't proving the hypothesis):

[too many people ]"can’t really get the fact that it’s not about proving a theorem, it’s about being curious about things. There aren’t enough people who will apply [DOE] as a way of finding things out"

Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery shows that the goal of design of experiments is to learn and refine your experiment based on the knowledge you gain and experiment again. It is a process of discovery. That discovery is useful when it allows you to make improvement in real world outcomes. That is the objective.