Toyota Culture That Culminated in the Safety

¶ … Toyota culture that culminated in the safety issues and decline of the Toyota company although this is controversial;. Some say that the Toyota culture with its emphasis on family inheritance engendered decline, whilst others say that it was the reign of t he non-family members that culminated in the decline. Still others insist that there was no decline at all and that that Toyota still shows profit. Either way, there seems to be unanimous agreement that internal corruption which includes protekzia of family members ruling the organization and promotion and employment acquisition working on connection rather than merit works to destruction of organization and should be eradicated for th e-company's good.

Mr. Toyoda's in-house detractors say the president has created an informal team of loyalists, making it tough for managers trying to communicate through the formal channels. One non-family manager says the current executive structure operates like a "shadow management team," doubling up information and management. (p.5)

Other complaints include the fact that leaders, such as Mr. Toyota, were slow in addressing the press regarding the controversies and that they kept them hidden and underground for as long as possible, refraining from addressing them. This can be detrimental to the company's general strategy since it needs to maintain its shareholders and the general publics trust in its service and operations. Failures such as these reveal weaknesses and can make the public distrustful of the company as a whole.

Returning to the Toyota culture, non-Toyodians ran the company from 1950 to 1967, but the feud really began in the mid-1990s, when the family relinquished control of the chief executive's office for the first time since Eiji Toyoda, the cousin of the founder, became president in 1967. When the present Akio's uncle, Tatsuro, stepped down from a stroke, the company was doing very badly barely able to compete in the trade friction with the U.S., the weak Japanese economics, and the Japanese currency that was playing havoc with exports.

It was only when the non-Toyodians took the helm beginning with Mr. Okuda in 1995 and ending with Mr. Watanabe in 2009. that Toyota gained the strong reputation that it has today.

It was the non-Toyodians who devised the "2005 vision" as well as the "global master plans" and "global profit management plans' that would be used to realize this vision during the intermittent 10 years. It was they, to, who implemented revolutionary innovations that gave th e-company a place in hsiotry and raised it to unprecedented highs. In the 15 year non-family reign, Toyota not only displaced GM as the world's biggest auto maker but also made profits that zoomed to an industry-leading high of 8.6%

The non-Toyodfians attacked the Toyodians and tried to eradicate nepotism. Unfortunately, the company returned to the Toyodians and the family feud continued.

Those who attack the non-family predecessors, however, say that it was their emphasis on profit and fatter margins above that of quality that sacrificed the Toyota reputation and made its implementation strategy go to ruin: "The problems arose when "some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit," Mr. Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March" (p2).

Raising a trifle above the feud, however, the crux of the issue seems to be reducible to one of culture, namely one that is so common in Asia where businesses usually center around the family.

Rather than focusing on quality management and client satisfaction, Toyota seems to have driven its energies to focusing on whether or not it was the fault of the family or the non-family members of the company who brought the company to shame.

The energy of the company seems to be distracted and diffracted in the issue of lineage and heritage. And that is a shame since, for strategic implementation to succeed and for a company to be successful all of its energies have to be focused consistently, obsessively, and simplemindedly on one object and that is client satisfaction. And it has to do so in a quality-minded way.

To do that, it needs open communication between management and employees with all working together to the same goal and all caring for the industry in the same way. Focus on external matters, such as internal family feud and questions of running of organization can only cause internal conflict and fission of organization which, in turn, weakens it both externally and internally and diverts it from achieving its fullest standards and accomplishing its best work. Workers become demotiavted and overturn is high.