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Toyota crisis creates new opportunities

The engineering, quality and subsequent public relations challenges experienced by Toyota in the early part of 2010 are similar to those experienced by many organizations with high-profile brands and associated high levels of customer expectation. When something goes publicly wrong, the high expectations we hold for the marquee brand in question represent a branding form of potential energy. This potential energy very quickly becomes kinetic energy when coupled with the catalysts of media scrutiny, consumer disappointment and absence of the simple explanation and fix consumers require in 2010.

Once something has gone badly wrong, of course, there is no turning back the clock. In the more recent case of BP (whose own troubles have eclipsed those of Toyota earlier in the year), CEO Tony Hayward candidly and repeatedly declared, “We will be judged on our response.” Hayward’s statement grimly and accurately recognizes that there is little to be materially gained at this stage from finger-pointing or publicly agonizing over the factors which led to catastrophe (be it deaths, injuries and fear caused by unintended vehicle acceleration, or a tragic oil platform accident and subsequent environmental disaster), but rather that all energy should be directed towards fixing the concerns and effects at hand. This of course may require the analysis, identification and elimination of cause – but there will be time later for the discussion and allocation of corporate and human responsibility.

However, the causes and effects of engineering problems quickly breed a second-tier issue, namely the increasingly quick (thanks to ever-shortening news cycles and the blanket nature of media coverage) and lasting damage to brand and reputation. It is in this context that an ability to quickly identify cause – or at the very least describe clearly what you are doing to identify and eliminate cause – takes on an importance all its own.

One word that has consistently appeared during the very public discussion of Toyota’s perceived organizational failures during the last few months has been “leadership.” Commentators have happily bandied this word around as though it were the single silver bullet which would fix, and would have prevented, anything going wrong in the first place. Consumers even got a chance to see leadership in action, through the spectacle of the human embodiment of Toyota’s leadership – in the form of Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s president - going before the US Congress to represent his company.

Leadership, then, is clearly something considered to be a critical element in a company’s successful and profitable conversion of resources to goods which consumers will value and trust (there is a reason they are called ”goods” and not “bads”). The problem with leadership as a “thing” is that it is pretty abstract. It’s one of those highly personal words that means something different to everyone, like “happiness” or “success.” Don’t just take our word for it, go out today and ask 10 people what leadership means to them - you will probably get 10 different answers. “Leadership – well, we know we’ve got to have more of it, but we can’t actually tell you what it is” – it’s a sine qua non which also has a certain je ne sais quoi.
 

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