The car in front is a Toyota… because the accelerator pedal is jammed
Talk about damage control. Toyota are recalling thousands of cars in the UK alone, and thousands more all over the world.
In total, the number of Toyota cars recalled was around 8 million on the 9th of Feb 2010.
And that was just because of the accelerator problem.
Another half a million were recalled over a break problem.
Would you buy a Toyota right now?
If the answer is no, or you have doubts about it, then consider that up until very recently Toyota were regarded as one of the very best. Toyota was synonym with quality and durability.
As the advert proudly reminded us: the car in front is a Toyota.
Now that very same slogan is backfiring on them like an old, clapped out Skoda, which – conversely – has now become a trustworthy, snazzy car, even for the executives out there, at the hands of VW.
So what can we learn from Toyota’s mistakes?
One of the things that set Toyota apart from not just car manufacturers and but most companies in general, was the fact that they have a great system.
How well and effective you are out doing what you do always boils down to how good your system is.
But things are going wrong at Toyota lately, so whilst high blood-pressured executives scream behind the scenes and red-faced spokespeople apologise publicly for yet another blunder, somebody somewhere needs to go back to the drawing board and check the system.
It’s possible that the system itself isn’t at fault itself in Toyotas case, and that the issues have arisen from failing to implement the system properly.
Isn’t that nearly always the case?
Remember the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster? Somebody at Nasa took a shortcut, bypassed the safety system that somebody else had built and put in place.
The system that said: if there’s ice on the launch pad, we don’t launch.
Why on Earth somebody decided to bypass common sense is beyond me.
With Toyota we may never know who decided what, why and when, but the point of the system is to follow it, not to try and outsmart it.
If you work hard on a system for your own business, spend your time tweaking it from the mistakes you make, but don’t try to shortcut around it. That doesn’t make any sense.
The system is there to protect you.
But what if it was the system at fault?
Since what we’re trying to do here is learn from Toyota’s mistakes without really knowing fully what caused the mistakes in the first place, we have to also take into consideration that the system may have failed.
So how do we apply this to our businesses? Like this: we check the system. We tested. It’s called disaster recovery, and you’re supposed to put it to the test.
If you run a network then your disaster recovery plan needs to take into account a number of scenarios based around total failure, from power cuts to server hard disk crashes and data loss.
Testing it is just a matter running through things backwards.
Test your backups often. Set up a schedule.
What does your disaster recovery plan entails for your business?
What do you mean you don’t have a disaster recovery plan?
Do you even have a system?
If not, you have work to do.
If you do, test everything.
The bottom line: takeaways
- have a system
- tweak the system
- test the system
- stick to the system
Business tip: it takes a very long time to build a solid, trustworthy reputation, but only a bad decision to completely unravel all your hard work. Figure out a system or process that ensures that your decisions are well thought out and triple checked, and have a disaster recovery system for when things go wrong.
Data sources & Reference:
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