Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [16]
But there are no infallible procedures, and even the best process can’t account for the unforeseeable. Although Toyota and other successful procedure-based bureaucracies may seem to run like a Swiss watch, they don’t. Because of the inevitable problems in complex manufacturing, service, or distribution processes, they stop and break down quite often. At the best of these companies, many of these stoppages are not caused by problems but are initiated by the employees themselves or by the management.
On a Friday at noon in January 2001, just three flawless weeks after opening its first small-car plant in Europe, Toyota’s management in Valenciennes, France, ordered the assembly line stopped. Facing the astonished operators, the managers explained that this break was voluntary, would last half an hour, and was called to allow operators to put in place their ideas to improve the existing procedures. At Toyota, as well as in many other successful bureaucracies, procedures are not designed to tell underskilled or undermotivated people how to perform their tasks and to control them as they carry them out. No, the procedures are designed to capture the best known way to accomplish routine tasks. So, unlike in so many companies, rare is the Toyota employee who complains about “this dumb procedure.” If he does he can simply change it.
At Toyota, it is not the foremen, or group leaders, who determine whether operators follow the procedures. It’s the operators themselves. If the results are not up to standards, most often the cause is the operator’s action, which he self-corrects. But sometimes the operator is conforming to procedure and the cause is the procedure itself, which is no longer adequate and has to be improved or replaced by a better one. That’s why lean-manufacturing procedures coexist with teams that enjoy substantial autonomy to reorganize their work, and standard-enforcing TQM coexists with continuous improvement and idea-management systems, which are the opposite of idea-killing suggestion boxes because they ensure that ideas are quickly and efficiently implemented. This encourages everyone to suggest useful improvements. This flip side—the procedure-challenging, reorganizing, and improving side—is as important as the standard procedures themselves, and perhaps even more so. Without it, employees won’t commit themselves to the standard procedures handed down to them by managers or industrial engineers. In fact, at Toyota they don’t even have a job title of industrial engineer. In order for employees to respect the procedures, they have to be involved in their design, control, and improvement. In short, the standards have to be theirs, not management’s or the engineers’.6
That’s the paradox most companies that rushed to copy lean manufacturing and TQM did not understand. So it’s no wonder that according to one study, two-thirds of the TQM projects at American companies have not met expectations.7 But there is no real paradox. They focused on the tools and ignored the deep assumption that Toyota’s management holds about its workers. In a way, Toyota’s workers—in spirit—resemble pre-Industrial Revolution artisans in charge of what they do.
For all that, in many ways Toyota is still a traditional bureaucracy, with the accompanying hierarchies, policies, and procedures. And yet Toyota has a dramatic—but often overlooked