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Toyota’s Chance to Reemerge as a Stronger Global Company
Although some communication was lost in translation, Toyota Motor Corporation President and CEO Akio Toyoda looked and sounded sincere before a Congressional committee as he apologized for some of the problems with his company's cars and expressed his determination to fix them at any cost. It is still too early to tell whether his testimony will lead to the restoration of the Toyota brand, but it was clearly a step in the right direction.In the hours of his testimony and during a US television interview later, he attributed Toyota's less-than-stellar quality control to a rapid business expansion. He also stressed his intent to return to the "customer first" principle by listening much more intently to the voices of all Toyota users and responding more quickly to their complaints and inquiries.
If his plan is carried out in a timely manner, Toyota, most likely, will eventually come back. It might even reemerge as a stronger, truly global company. Yet, the road ahead promises to be quite bumpy as the company tackles a host of issues, including numerous class-action lawsuits, corporate restructuring, more effective public relations, and more than anything else, its customers' lingering uncertainty about the safety of Toyota vehicles. Despite Toyoda's insistence that his cars are safe, many people, including myself, are not totally convinced partly because he fell short of fully identifying the specific cause(s) of the controversial unintended acceleration.
These challenges are not insurmountable for Toyota, but it has to shift gears to deal with and take advantage of this new reality. Particularly, Toyota will have to effectively cope with the keener attention paid to it by all sorts of media outlets, including the ever-expanding social media, as they will be crucial to the company's efforts to repair and reestablish its reputation. Not surprisingly, before, during and after the live broadcast of Toyoda's testimony, the US media put out numerous stories and analyses discussing the future of the world's largest automaker. One radio program even touched on the possible resignation of Toyoda, which cannot be entirely ruled out if the situation worsens and gets out of control. It is an unlikely scenario, however, because Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda, probably is the right, and perhaps only, person capable of rallying the company's more than 320,000 employees to turn the current crisis around.
At the beginning of his testimony, Toyoda stated that when the company finds defects, "we always stop, strive to understand the problem, and make changes to improve further," and described the process as "the core value we have kept closest to our hearts since the founding days of the company." Clearly, now is one of those critical junctures for Toyota to vigorously exercise this core value, and show the world how it works. At a time when several major financial firms on Wall Street have fallen apart and leading carmakers in Detroit are being bailed out by the government, nobody can be certain about the future of Toyota. And yet, Toyoda's sincerity and his infatuation with cars somehow left me with the impression that he probably can ride over all the difficulties in front of him. On CNN's Larry King show, when asked what kind of car he drives, Toyoda, a trained test driver himself, hesitated a bit before answering the question - not because he didn't want to answer, but because he drives "200 different vehicles in a year." "I love cars as much as anyone," he told the Congressional committee. I bet he meant safe cars.
Atsushi Yuzawa
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion or position of Concepts & Strategies, Inc.
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Hi Atsushi!!!
Robert