The latest examples of Leadership Culture vs Warrior Culture: Toyota and GM. If youre unaware of these recent stories, you can start with the two links below. My thoughts are speculative but based on 20 years of similar work (and confrontations with weasels) Not mentioned in either story are the names of the manufacturing and quality engineers who argued against the design engineers (and their management advocates) for design choice A (the higher quality choice) versus design choice B (the lower cost choice). As has happened over and over in industry, the lower cost choice won...not because it was shown to actually result in a lower cost (i.e. poor quality nearly always ends up at a higher cost) but because of the politics of leadership culture where decisions are made in conference rooms based on who has the best looking powerpoint presentation and/or the strongest deception skills and not as a result of diligence. The reason that youll never hear the names of the manufacturing and quality engineers (or the line leaders, the assembly and test operators or the repair operators) in these stories is that, despite fines and lawsuits, leadership culture largely has the goal of protecting leadership culture. Sure, there will be a massive recovery effort where one executive after another proclaims all of the important lessons learned and how this will make the company stronger moving forward. But...at some point, in the near future, a weasel (armed with a powerpoint presentation, falsified data, and an eye toward career advancement) will win the day in a conference room...and hell win the day because of decision maker in that conference rooms were likely weasels making the same arguments years earlier. ...and the beat goes on... latimes/business/la-fi-hy-toyota-billion-dollar-justice-department-settlement-20140319,0,7794824.story#axzz2wVtPTL4f reuters/article/2014/03/19/us-gm-recall-lawsuit-idUSBREA2I27520140319
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:00:33 +0000
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