An interesting HBR Blog post ‘Learning from Toyota’s Stumble’ by Stephen Spear. It reflects on what we can learn from the recent issues Toyota is facing with pedal malfunctions. Toyota for a long time has been leader in quality and books were published on the Toyota Way in almost all management area’s. From this case we can learn that this competitive success is fluid.

According to Spear the way to sustain success is to continue learning and improving: “The capabilities to do this are poweful but fragile and need constant reinforcement … This includes developing people by investing time in mentoring and developing their capabilities for pushing the boundaries of quality, efficiency, safety, and responsiveness, and taught them how to build those capabilities in others. But as we are now sadly seeing, the capacity for developing people can be overstretched. It was not recognizing this and succumbing to the temptation to make growth its first priority that led to Toyota’s current problems”. This stroll of events caused great damage to the carefully developed image of Toyota being the most reliable car manufacturer in the World with quality and innovation as it’s guiding principles.

Conclusion: It is already hard to become a true learning organization, but it is even harder to stay one …

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