HC:
Be glad to.
Bill Scherkenbach
Consultant for the Improvement of
Individuals and Organizations
*****
Views on News: Tragedy at Toyota: How Not to Lead in Crisis
"Toyota can only regain its footing by transforming itself from top to bottom to deliver the highest quality automobiles," says professor Bill George of the beleaguered company. He offers seven recommendations for restoring consumer confidence in the safety and quality behind the storied brand.
Katharine Horler, of Connexions, which provides advice to teenagers, said people were wrong to judge careers advice on whether they ended up doing the job their advisor suggested.
She explained: "That's not what careers advice is about.
"Careers advice is about developing decision making skills, developing resilience to help you manage the ups and downs that come with a career.
Quote:
豐田社長豐田章男在周三出席美國國會聽證會，他為豐田的安全問題道歉。然而對美國人來說，更重要的是豐田大規模召回汽車能否根絕問題，但豐田高層周二說可能無法靠召回維修的方式完全解決暴衝問題。
華爾街日報周三報導，根據豐田章男向眾議院監督暨政府改革委員會提交的書面證詞，他為豐田涉及的各起交通意外道歉，對因為安全問題而召回 逾850萬部汽車表達悔意。他承認豐田擴張速度，超過公司人力與組織的增長，把汽車品質問題歸咎於公司成長太快而無法完全掌控。
眾議院能源委員會周二已率先召開第1場聽證會，主席維克曼（Henry Waxman）痛批豐田高層過去10年漠視汽車暴衝問題，並指責包括國家高速公路交通安全管理局（NHTSA）等汽車安全監管機關沒有足夠設備去評估汽車的電子故障問題。
維克曼指汽車業已經進入電子化世代，但NHTSA卻仍停留在過去機械操控結構的舊思維，認為NHTSA必須有新工具和資源，去確保汽車電子操控系統和車用電腦的安全性；指豐田事件所引發的危機，將必須由立法來監管和解決。
對於有人指美國政府因為擁有通用汽車60％股權，而讓NHTSA修理豐田以提升通用的競爭力，運輸部長拉胡德（Roy LaHood）對此直斥胡說八道。
美國許多國會議員深信豐田的電子故障，是導致多起交通意外的肇因，豐田美國區總裁兼營運長藍茲（Jim Lentz）周二在聽證會上強調其電子油門控制系統沒有問題，強調暴衝是油門踏板等零件問題造成。
Tech.view
Feb 22nd 2010 From The Economist online
LATE one night in a Ginza bar, a veteran executive at Nissan recounted to your correspondent the early days of exporting to America, when his firm’s cars were known abroad as Datsuns. Before being shipped, all export models went through additional inspections because the cost of fixing warranty claims so far from the factory and its supply chain would wipe out any profit made on them. On the rare occasions they did break, the parts had to be shipped in from Japan.
One day, the story goes, a plane carrying a crate of such parts lost an engine over the Midwest and had to jettison its cargo to save weight. On the ground below, a farmer noticed the debris falling from the sky. “Ah,” he mumbled to himself, “it’s raining Datsun cogs.”
The point the Nissan man was making with this shaggy-dog story was that the quality of Japanese cars sold abroad was well above average while they were being shipped from factories in Japan and extra precautions taken to save on warranty claims. At the time, this strategy made perfect sense. Japanese carmakers saved a ton of money from not having to finance expensive inventories around the world. Meanwhile, Honda, Toyota and Nissan (the Datsun name was dropped in 1982) gained reputations, deservedly so, for quality and reliability. Until Toyota’s recent fiasco, those brand values remained largely intact, despite Japanese carmakers relocating much of their capacity to factories overseas.
The modern view is that carmakers everywhere have learned the secrets of Japanese manufacturing and now build products of comparable quality. That is debatable. Price for price, Japanese manufacturers still manage to make their products more reliable than average. At least, they did until recently. But, in what might now be viewed as a straw in the wind, Toyota (or, rather, its luxury Lexus brand) was dethroned from the top spot in last year’s J.D. Power report on vehicle dependability.
J.D. Power and Associates, a market-research firm based in Westlake Village, California, issues this report on the American car market every year. Lexus had topped it for the previous 14. In 2009, though, Buick and Jaguar came joint top. Toyota still did well overall. Its vehicles earned nine awards for reliability in specific market segments. No other marque, save Ford’s Lincoln division, which took two, won more than one such award. But the balloon of invincibility had been punctured.
The person who began the process of inflating that balloon was, ironically, an American. From 1950 onwards W. Edwards Deming, an expert on quality control, taught a generation of Japanese managers how to improve their products. The lesson they took back to their factories was the overriding importance of statistical quality control (SQC). In industrial countries elsewhere, even in Deming’s own America, manufacturers were still relying on inspection and rejection of faulty parts—a horrendously wasteful process.
One of the main tools for SQC that Deming introduced to his Japanese disciples was the control chart, invented by Walter Shewhart at Bell Labs, the research arm of America’s former telephone monopoly, Bell System, in the 1920s. Shewhart was among the first to recognise that data collected from observations of manufacturing processes rarely follow a simple Gaussian distribution (bell curve) in the way that natural phenomena like human height do. Instead, each manufacturing process exhibits its own pattern of variation. Some display a controlled variation inherent to the process itself. Others display uncontrolled variation caused by something external to the process.
The distinction between the two patterns goes to the philosophical heart of probability theory. Deming and his colleagues at Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of Bell System, coined the terms “common cause” for the former and “special cause” for the latter.
For quality purposes, any common cause of variations in manufacturing (tool wear, say, or poor set-up) can be predicted statistically from previous observations, and the process controlled accordingly. Any special cause in variation is something that comes out of the blue from outside the process (a power surge, perhaps, or an operator falling asleep) and is beyond the scope of statistical forecasting.
The purpose of a control chart is to identify instances when variations in manufacturing are causing the specifications of a product to move above or below a mean value by more than a critical amount—say, three standard deviations. The standard deviation is a measure of the spread of a statistical curve such as a bell curve around its mean. The idea, then, is to define acceptable tolerances above and below this mean value, and design the manufacturing process to draw in the tails of the curve so that those tolerances are met a given fraction of the time. If the tolerance limits are three standard deviations from the mean, and the curve is a true Gaussian distribution, then 99.7% of production will within the zone of tolerance. If that falls, it suggests something had gone wrong. This way, any unpredictable special-cause effects can be spotted and corrected before doing too much harm.
Many refinements have been made to statistical control and the theory of quality assurance since Deming’s days—with acronyms like TQM, CMMI, MSA, QFD, FMEA and APQP, each with its own loyal band of adherents and eras of fashion. One of the more successful has been the Six Sigma strategy for identifying and removing the causes of defects, pioneered by Motorola in the 1980s. (Sigma is the Greek letter that mathematicians use to represent the standard deviation in equations.) Today, Six Sigma is used by two-thirds of the firms in Fortune’s “500” list.
Processes that operate with Six Sigma quality (in principle, within six standard deviations of a mean value) over a short sampling period produce defect levels over the long term of less than 3.4 per million—providing, of course, a lot of other management practices are also in place. When achieved, this translates into a production yield of 99.99966%. Six Sigma is said to have saved Motorola more than $17 billion over the years.
So, how did Toyota—a manufacturer that has made some of the most significant contributions to the science of quality assurance—manage to screw up so badly? It is not just the move offshore. Though the firm has 52 overseas plants in 27 countries, the quality practices honed at its headquarters in Aichi prefecture can be packaged and transplanted to Mexico or Kentucky just as readily as to a Komatsu press shop.
Nor was it Toyota’s obsession with overtaking General Motors at any cost to become the world’s largest carmaker. There is no evidence to suggest that increasing volume on modern production lines will lead inevitably to some loss of quality.
Instead, two recent trends, both software related, hint at the reason behind Toyota’s unexpected decline. One is the shortening of product-development cycles generally in the car industry. These are down from a typical four or five years to little more than 15 months, thanks to computer-aided design and manufacturing, and the virtual simulation of the resulting products. To save money and time, Toyota has even dispensed on occasion with building test “mules” and other engineering prototypes.
The other trend is the wholesale replacement of mechanical components with electronic controls. It started with ignition systems, then spread to air-conditioning, cruise-control, engine-management, throttle linkages, transmissions, and now the steering and braking systems. Drive-by-wire is not cheap, but it reduces the number of components needed to do the job. It also allows them to do extra things as well as to compensate for wear and changes in driving style and road conditions.
But software is not hardware, and software “engineers”, despite their appropriation of the name, are a different breed from the sort that bash metal. Programming digital controllers is not one of Toyota’s core competences. Even with the most diligent of testing, bugs will always find their way into software. Right now, it seems Toyota is learning that lesson the hard way.
TOKYO--Nissan Motor Co. said Wednesday it will recall 539,864 trucks, sport-utility vehicles and mini vans in North America and some Asian and European markets due to problems with brake pedal pins and fuel gauges.
The announcement follows its recall last week of 76,415 vehicles in Japan because of issues with electric cables connected to the engines, and comes on the heels of General Motors Co.'s recall Tuesday of 1.3 million compact cars with suspect power steering.
Automobile manufacturers have become all too aware of the need for a swift response to quality issues as Toyota Motor Corp. takes the flak for the way it handled the recall of 8.5 million vehicles world-wide.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda testified in a U.S. congressional hearing regarding its product safety last week, and flew from that country to apologize in China earlier this week.
Sales of Toyota vehicles in the U.S. dropped by 8.7% in February from a year earlier. The company has responded by launching a promotional campaign.
Nissan said there have been no reported accidents or injuries related to the problems that prompted its latest recall.
The Japanese car maker said it found a manufacturing error in brake pedal pins, about which there have been three reported instances of it partially disengaging.
The company also said that fuel gauges in vehicles with high mileages may indicate the amount of remaining fuel incorrectly.
Models subject to the pedal pin recall are the Infiniti QX56 SUV, Titan pickup truck, Armada SUV and Quest minivan. Besides the latter, these are also subject to the fuel gauge recall, together with the Frontier pickup truck, Pathfinder and Xterra SUV.
Of the 539,864 vehicles affected, 418,865 are in the U.S. with the remainder in Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine and other markets.
This article was reported by Bill Vlasic, Hiroko Tabuchi and Jo Craven McGinty and written by Mr. Vlasic.
Akio Toyoda, right, the president of Toyota, at a plant in Georgetown, Ky., last week. He apologized Monday to consumers in China for quality concerns in a bid to bolster Toyota’s reputation.
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Toyota has recalled six million cars in the United States over concerns about sudden acceleration. But an analysis of government documents shows that many Toyota Camrys built before 2007, which were not subject to recalls, have been linked to a comparable number of speed-control problems as recalled Camrys.
While owners of all makes of vehicles have filed complaints with the government about speed control problems, the analysis — based on a review of 12,700 complaint records in the United States over the last decade by The New York Times — reveals that Toyota had more complaints involving crashes than any other carmaker.
Many of the complaints were about vehicles not covered by recalls. The 2002 Camry, for example, had about 175 speed-control complaints. Roughly half of those involved crashes.
By comparison, the 2007 Camry, which was recalled, was the subject of about 200 speed-control complaints, with fewer than a quarter of those resulting in acci-dents.
In all, federal safety regulators said they had received complaints alleging that unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles caused 34 deaths.
In his Congressional testimony last week, James E. Lentz III, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., noted that other auto manufacturers had had complaints of sudden acceleration.
Of the 12,700 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration consumer complaints analyzed by The Times, the Ford Motor Company had the most, about 3,500.
Toyota ranked second, with about 3,000 complaints, but those were linked to far more accidents — 1,000 — compared to 450 crashes for Ford.
All told, from 2000 through 2009, Toyota had one speed-control crash complaint per 20,454 vehicles sold in the United States. Ford had one complaint per 64,679 vehicles. Honda had one per 70,112 and G.M. one per 179,821.
Asked about The Times’s findings, a Toyota spokesman said on Monday that pre-2007 Camrys had been investigated and cleared of defects in three previous inquiries by the safety agency. “At the conclusion of these investigations, no specific evidence of a trend regarding safety issues was found,” said Brian Lyons, the spokesman.
Mr. Lyons said that the 2002 and 2003 Camrys with six-cylinder engines had also been subject to two corporate service actions aimed at addressing momentary surges in acceleration. He said the changes were “not issued to resolve any computer software or electronic throttle control concerns.”
A separate examination by The Times of transport ministry records in Japan revealed a similar finding. In reports since 2001, Toyota vehicles have been cited with a greater frequency in complaints of sudden acceleration than those of other major carmakers.
Toyota has blamed gas pedals that can stick and bulky floor mats for unexplained acceleration in its recalled vehicles.
Camrys sold before 2007 in the United States, and almost all Toyotas sold in Japan, use a different pedal design and different floor mats. So Toyota has said that there is no need to recall those cars.
Records suggesting that these Camrys and Japanese Toyotas have sudden acceleration problems have raised questions about whether there might be another explanation, including the possibility that the cars’ electronic systems malfunction, resulting in unexpected acceleration.
Toyota’s chief executive, Akio Toyoda, testified before a Congressional panel last week that he was “absolutely confident” there was no problem with Toyota’s electronics.
“Tests have been repeated,” he said. “However, no malfunction or problems were identified.”
But transportation officials in the United States said in interviews that they were reviewing whether to expand their investigations of Toyota to include pre-2007 Camrys. N.H.T.S.A. had cleared the pre-2007 Camrys of possible defects in two previous investigations of unintended acceleration, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Department, Olivia Alair, said. She said these same models would now be part of an inquiry into the role that electronic throttle control systems may have played in Toyota’s speed-control problems.
“If N.H.T.S.A. can find evidence of a possible defect trend with Toyota or other products during this review, they will open a defect investigation,” Ms. Alair said. At a hearing in Washington on Tuesday, the transportation secretary Ray Lahood that the N.H.T.S.A. was not slow to starting investigations into Toyota vehicles despite a spike in reports of sudden acceleration in recent years. The agency opened at least two inquiries, he said.
Announcing new and rare investigations in Japan, the Seiji Maehara, the transport minister, said last week of Toyota’s executives, “There’s a high possibility that Toyota has not provided the state with adequate information.”
Last Wednesday, the transport ministry said it would examine 38 complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyotas reported from 2007 through 2009, as well as 134 cases in cars produced by all other automakers that sell in Japan. No deaths or injuries have been reported as a result of those incidents, the ministry said.
The Times’s analysis of complaints in the United States covered those filed since 2000 involving all makes and models of cars manufactured this decade. A complaint about speed control may indicate that the vehicle accelerated excessively or inadequately.
The single largest source of these complaints was the 2007 model Camry.
That model, along with Camrys made since, has been recalled twice, beginning last fall, in connection with unintended acceleration — first for unsecured floor mats, and then for faulty accelerator pedals that could stick when depressed.
A high incidence of crashes linked to speed control has occurred in earlier model Camrys.
During 2004, 125 crashes reported to the highway safety agency were linked to speed control. About 80 of those involved Camrys.
In Japan, The Times examined all the reports of Toyota malfunctions brought to the transport ministry since 2001, about 3,700 in all, and, for comparison, all comparable reports on Honda over the same period, about 2,400.
The examination found 99 cases of sudden acceleration or engine surge in Toyotas, compared with 18 reports of similar problems in Hondas.
The transport ministry received a sudden acceleration report for every 150,000 Toyotas sold. This compares with one report for about every 300,000 Hondas sold.
Although Toyota sold 1.35 million cars and trucks in Japan last year, that many reports “is not a small number,” said Tetsuo Taniguchi, a chief researcher at the Japanese government-affiliated National Traffic Safety and Environment Laboratory. “If pedals or floor mats are not the problem in Japan, it’s time for Toyota to investigate what is.”
Ministry officials note that a small fraction of incidents make their way to the ministry because most drivers report auto malfunctions to their dealers. And in Japan dealers and manufacturers are under no obligation to give that information to the government, unless the company believes it failed to comply with national safety standards.
For the government to order a recall, it must have proof of a potentially dangerous defect, which is difficult to find without cooperation from the automaker.
On Monday, Mr. Toyoda also continued his campaign to shore up Toyota’s reputation, apologizing at a news conference in China to consumers there for quality concerns.
The Obama administration may recommend that carmakers install a brake override system that is intended to prevent the sudden acceleration episodes that have led to recalls of millions of Toyotas, the transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said on Tuesday.
Mr. LaHood made his comments at a hearing held by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Energy and Transportation, one of three such hearings in Congress in the last two weeks that examined the Toyota recalls and the response to them by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The override system is meant to deactivate the accelerator when the brake pedal is pressed.
Often called a “smart pedal,” the feature is now installed in many automobiles sold worldwide, including models from BMW, Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Volkswagen.
Once the system is installed, it will stop the car if both the brake pedal and accelerator pedal are depressed.
Although the systems have been available from other car companies for several years, Toyota did not install it on its cars. But in the wake of the massive recalls, it has begun installing it on Camry, Lexus and Avalon models. About 20 percent of its vehicles in North America have the override. Last week, the automaker said the system also would be installed on its Tacoma, Venza and Sequoia models.
At the hearing Tuesday, both Toyota and the safety agency faced sharp criticism.
The committee’s chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, scolded the automaker for failing to listen to American executives’ warnings about rising safety problems.
Last week, officials in Toyota’s North American operations said they did not have the authority to order large-scale recalls, saying the responsibility rested solely with Japan.
At the hearing on Tuesday, the committee released a presentation from 2006 by James E. Press, who was then in charge of Toyota’s sales operations in the United States. In it, he urged Japanese officials to be more transparent about safety matters.
Mr. Press subsequently became the first non-Japanese member of the Toyota board, but left to join Chrysler.
“Safety took a second seat to profits,” Senator Rockefeller said. “Things do not happen in Japanese corporations by chance. They happen by decision.”
Mr. Rockefeller is a longtime ally of Toyota who studied in Japan during college and spent years wooing the company, eventually landing an engine plant from Toyota in Buffalo, W.Va. Nonetheless, he said he was frustrated by a lack of direct answers from senior Toyota executives at the hearing. “There is more knowledge at the table than has disclosed itself,” he said.
Mr. Rockefeller raised the subject of the brake override system. “We’re looking at it,” Mr. LaHood said. “We think it is a good safety device, and we’re trying to figure out if we should be recommending it.”
In a lengthy exchange with Mr. LaHood, Mr. Rockefeller suggested that federal safety officials accepted Toyota’s explanation that floor mats caused sudden unintended acceleration because they did not understand the cars’ computer system, which many drivers and critics have pointed to as a possible cause.
“I think N.H.T.S.A. investigators would rather focus on floor mats than microchips because they understand floor mats,” Mr. Rockefeller said. “It’s a major letdown on N.H.T.S.A.’s part, looking back and up to the present.”
Mr. LaHood said he did not know whether the agency had “turned a blind eye” to the electronics issue, but vowed a “complete review” of the situation.
Toyota executives again tried to assure lawmakers that they were taking steps to rectify the problems behind the recalls. “This loss of trust is more costly than anything else to Toyota,” said Yoshimi Inaba, the head of Toyota’s North American operations.
Executives asserted, as they have before, that the sudden unintended acceleration in Toyota cars was caused by gas pedals that can become obstructed by floor mats or stick because of design flaws, and not by problems in the electronic systems.
“I want to be absolutely clear: As a result of our extensive testing, we do not believe sudden unintended acceleration because of a defect in our E.T.C.S. has ever happened,” Takeshi Uchiyamada, an executive vice president at Toyota, said, referring to the car’s engine throttle control systems. However, Mr. Uchiyamada, the chief engineer on the Prius, said Toyota “will continue to search for any event in which such a failure could occur.”
Through February, the N.H.T.S.A. had received 43 complaints of fatal accidents that are said to have involved unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles since 2000, the Transportation Department said. The department has not confirmed the complaints, which cover 52 deaths and 38 injuries. Three-quarters of the episodes were reported to the safety agency in the last four months, since Toyota’s initial recall in October 2009.
Toyota executives promised to be more responsive to driver complaints as well as safety warnings from the government, and then assured lawmakers that the company was taking steps to improve quality control.
“It is clear to us that we did not listen as carefully as we should — or respond as quickly as we must — to our customers’ concerns,” Mr. Inaba said.
But the Senate committee released a company presentation in which Mr. Press urged the Japanese parent to give Toyota America “better information” on quality issues.
The document, a slide show presentation and accompanying notes dated 2006 also urged Toyota to “strengthen communications” among the company’s divisions in the United States and Toyota’s headquarters. “We need faster information flow, and more technical support when hot issues arise,” the notes read.
A core concept, and my favorite among Deming’s ideas, considers quality in “the matrix of relationships." This principle is key to health care.
