The sin of believing your own publicity.

All of what we do, for our clients and for ourselves is based in systems thinking. As a result we've been more keenly interested than most at the unfolding story of the Toyota crisis. We've watched Toyota's growth both in reputation and sales over many a year now and always with admiration - until now. Over recent years there has also been a boom in Toyota based management books. Indeed it's hard to find a management book published in the last ten years that doesn't have either Toyota in its title or contain copious mentions of the company.

The story of the gaffes committed in not listening to their customer's complaints and pretending there was no problem, to accepting that there was a problem but not reacting quickly enough to it will no doubt produce many reprints of those books and spawn a whole new set in the categories of PR and disaster management.

The question in my head through all of this has been - did they begin to believe their own publicity, were their heads turned by so much praise? In fact I was reminded of the case of Sainsburys who were a client of ours through the 80s and 90s. They were at that time family led and quite simply believed that they were the best, which they had been without doubt, but they refused to believe that the runners coming up on the rails were a genuine threat. We were working with other retailers at the time and could see clearly that Sainsburys weren't as good as they thought they were in many areas and were clinging to what had worked well in the 70s. They just didn't listen to us and they were in for a terrible shock when Tesco, the upstart they disliked the most hit them very hard indeed.

Toyota appears to be the other side of that coin. The new kids on the worldwide block who overtook the old established front runners and forgot to carry on doing what they had done so well.

There's an excellent interview by John Shook on his Lean Enterprise web site with Takahiro Fujimoto, who thinks that Toyota did start to believe in their own infallibility which I would urge you to read.

PS. We have no control over the Google ads placed adjacent to these posts, one of which currently reads - Employee Rewards. Widest range of incentives to increase workplace motivation. - If you're tempted to click on that, please don't. Instead take a look at Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes or listen to his podcast.