Time out for Self-care - Lessons from Toyota

     The quote below from Gad Allon's 2/2/2010 blog entitled; "The Andon Cord that wasn’t pulled (and the Toyota recall)" has important lessons for all of us about noticing and responding intelligently to signs & symptoms of dysfunction or others' warnings to take better care of ourselves, and seek professional help. As with cars, it's better to temporarily halt production than crash and burn.

       "Lean operations (or lean manufacturing) is a management philosophy that calls for the elimination of wasteful activities and handling of quality issues through continuous improvement by making the people that closer to the line responsible for the process and its improvement. In our core Operations Management course we teach the principles of lean operations and use the Toyota Production System as an example of the implementations of these concepts. With such a colossal event, we must ask ourselves whether the adoption of these principles contributed to these issues or whether these quality issues happened despite the method by disregarding it. We must say that we don’t have yet all the information, but even with this limited information, I like the explanation provided by the NY Times:
       'Toyota’s handling of the problem is a story of how a long-trusted car maker lost sight of one of its bedrock principles. In Toyota lore, the ultimate symbol of the company’s attention to detail is the “andon cord,” a rope that workers on the assembly line can pull if something is wrong, immediately shutting down the entire line. The point is to fix a small problem before it becomes a larger one. But in the broadest sense, Toyota itself failed to pull the Andon cord on this issue, and treated a growing safety issue as a minor glitch — a point the company’s executives are now acknowledging in a series of humbling apologies.' 
       I think the problem goes beyond that. The Toyota Production System (and thus Lean operations) calls for the identification of the root cause of the problem. The Andon cord is only the first step in the process that should trigger a chain reaction geared at identifying problems and resolving them when they are still minor. One of the ways to find this root cause is called the “5 whys” – basically asking again and again “why” until one gets to the crux of the matter. It seems that in that the acceleration pedal case Toyota was too quick to try to go back on schedule to the extent that it even sent misleading messages regarding the causes, betraying its customers and its core principles." http://operationsroom.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/the-andon-cord-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-pulled-and-the-toyota-recall/ 

Gerbil on Wheel - from the web (would like to give due credit to the photographer)