Word: worlding
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...crisis management - though those are errors that will cost it more than $2 billion in repairs and lost sales this year. It's something more pernicious: the vapor lock that seems to have seized Toyota's mythologized corporate culture and turned one of the most admired companies in the world into a bunch of flailing gearheads. Not only is Toyota producing more flawed cars than in the past, but an organization known for its unrivaled ability to suss out problems, fix them and turn them into advantages is looking clueless on all counts. (See the 50 worst cars...
...reputation for quality that Toyota has damaged in just a few months took decades to build. Though Toyota was founded in the 1930s, its climb to global prominence started after World War II as the company became one of the exemplars of Japan's miracle - the creation of a successful, technologically advanced economy out of the ashes of war. In the 1950s, the company experimented with ways to manufacture cars more efficiently. Ironically, Japan's awful postwar poverty acted as a spur. The production techniques of American car companies - with heaps of stored components awaiting assembly, and ample machinery...
...cars; last year it had the capacity to make 10 million. Since 2000, when Toyota had 58 production sites, it has added 17. In that time, in other words, Toyota has added the capacity of a company virtually the size of Chrysler in a stated ambition to become the world's No. 1 auto company. (See pictures of Japanese design's greatest hits...
...early to say that consumers have not seen the last of massive, worldwide recalls of cars - in part because car companies have adopted the Toyota approach. Ford's new and highly praised strategy is to build "world cars" the way Toyota does, reducing the cost of manufacturing by making sure that more of its models share common parts on a relatively small number of platforms, built at plants around the world. That sounds like the epitome of manufacturing efficiency in our globalized economies. But it also explains why the brakes that caused the Prius' recall are found on Toyota...
...There's no sense in reinventing the wheel - going back to an industry in which every car demands a factory full of specific parts. But as the world's most famous automobile company has just demonstrated, if you're in the business of making cars, you'd better make sure your wheel works...