Dealing with Failure

Ooh, good point Kate. The gleefull 'Ha! Toyota got it wrong! What a mess they are!' stuff that is all over the web and the newspapers and magazines looks too much like a shark feeding frenzy or - from when I was a journalist (and one of the things that made me move away from journalism) - the similar journalist feeding frenzy / bandwagon effect of everyone jumping on a mistake and trashing the person/company who made it. As the guy in that post says, one of the things about Toyota is they never said "Look at us - aren't we great". The best companies never do. All the 'Toyota Way' etc books and holding them up as lean heroes was written by others. They've slipped and landed on their behind. As you say, the interesting thing is what they do next. Only justification at the moment for the beating up they are getting is the apparent lack of focus over the past year or more at Toyota on the safety implications - how many people allegedly died or were hurt as a result of possibly not addressing this earlier and more thoroughly. 

So, in among the leadership lessons we try and learn from what happened to Toyota, we have to be aware that the 'story' might not be the story at all. A key part of it, for example, is the accident database kept in the US that the media draws on every time it says how many people were allegedly killed or injured by a runaway Toyota. the media report the same figure regularly. What they don't say is that the database is a 'self-reporting' database - consumers fill it in online. Nobody checks it for accuracy. A journalist who dug deeper than most filled in an accident report for a fictional Toyota and in the field for his name wrote "ImACompleteLiar" or something like that. The database automatically updated its accident figures with his information, and gave the source of his accident report as "ImACompleteLiar". So, says the journalist, any Toyota driver who may have had an accident due to driver error or some other cause but prefers to blame a slipping floor mat or a sticking pedal or something can do so if they want. And since the brain is a great pattern detector and the pattern in all our heads now is that Toyotas have been accelerating when you don't want them to and/or failing to stop, then that's the first pattern they will see - the first interpretation their brain will come to - rather than that their foot slipped or their attention wandered. Interesting...