2-26-10 Are Safety and Growth Mutually Exclusive?

I don’t personally believe that they are, but in reading current headlines, one has to wonder if Toyota (a venerable company) has demonstrated that, yes, they are mutually exclusive.

If you have followed the news, Toyota says that the problems stem from taking their eye off of the quality (and hence, safety) ball as they rapidly grew. Now this is a company that has been in business for 50 years. They’ve been growing for a very long time….. And have had good quality for a very long time. And when you think about the criticality of a safe car in all of our little worlds, you have to wonder how they could let it happen.

Perhaps I’m biased because of the industry where I spent most of my working life. In the aerospace industry, believe me, we ALL take it personally when a plane falls out of the sky, regardless of the cause. When we design and build airplanes, safety is our first, middle, and last thought of the day. Oh yea, I used to get aggravated with the engineers when they would add in what we factory guys called “chicken rivets” to an area of the plane we were building. They were there “just in case” something adverse happened say, 30 years down the road. But then I would remind myself that my mom or my brother might be getting on that airplane during its service life. All of a sudden the chicken rivets would seem like a very good idea.

So how does the aerospace industry do it? Companies like Airbus and Boeing have been in business for a looong time, and having been growing during a majority of that time. And still they manage to build quality into their products every day. Interestingly enough, in the past 15 or so years, they have both learned a lot about quality and safety from Toyota and the car industry. And it all comes down to process. Establishing reliable, repeatable processes for every step of the way --- from engineering to manufacturing to in-service support. Then once the processes are established, following them religiously. And when the processes break, learning what went wrong and updating them to make them better. And when the processes aren’t broken? Analyzing and updating them to make them better.

The processes are designed to not only improve the airplanes but also to assure that they don’t fall out of the sky, and also to ensure that the company can produce them faster (hence growing). And when they aren’t followed, it has the potential to create a massive stain on the entire industry.

So my take on this whole Toyota problem isn’t that they grew too fast. It was most likely because they took their eye off of their proven processes or didn’t recognize that they had broken processes. My belief is that you can have growth without sacrificing quality and safety.

Cheers!