Have you noticed? It’s been several weeks now since Toyota had to recall any cars. The temptation to be wise after the event, of course, is almost irresistible - but if the crisis is, at last, over, what can the rest of us learn from this unhappy episode in Toyota’s history?
Jonathan Hemus of reputation management consultancy Insignia argues in The Guardian that it was actually a corporate strength - Toyota’s hard-earned reputation for quality and an internal culture that regarded anything less than perfection as shameful - that meant that its first instinct may have been to ‘put a lid on the stink’ rather than come clean and thus precipitate the crisis.
But is that sort of culture really so particular to Toyota? Perhaps if there are morals to be drawn, they may have to less to do with Toyota itself and more with the influence that a national culture can have on the way a global organization behaves.
It’s arguable that the very same combination of respect for authority, hierarchical management structure and fixation with the ideals of craftsmanship that allowed Toyota to grow to be the world’s leading car maker and define the much-lauded Toyota Way – but left it unable to respond in a credible and sure-footed way to a major crisis- is the very same one that is espoused by many top Japanese companies. In a culture where successful product liability claims by consumers are, moreover, few and far between, Japanese companies rarely respond to crises well – a point made recently by Jeremy Cato in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
This, then, may be one feature of the rise of the global corporation – the way that nationally-defined company cultures shape the fate of their organization, for good or bad. In the same way, perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of the buccaneering high-profile casualties of the recession – Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Stearns, RBS – was their very Anglo-Saxon-ness.
The evidence of this national DNA in organizations is something we see a lot of as we work with global companies – and their local offices - around the world. Scratch the surface, and maybe the multinational corporation isn’t as bland and homogeneous an entity as we all thought.
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