Articles

Zenjidoka II

The Power of Self-Reliance

Norman Bodek, President, PCS Press Inc.

Jeremy Green, PhD

Jidoka is one of the core principles of the Toyota Production System, one that empowers production line workers to take immediate action the moment a defect is detected.  The worker who discovers the defect pulls a red cord and the entire assembly line stops.  Co-workers and the supervisor rush over to that worker forming an ad hoc problem solving team.  The team, led by the worker who pulled the cord, quickly works to resolve the problem to prevent any defects from reaching the next operation.  Using Jidoka and other tools Toyota became the quality leader in the automotive industry, admired and respected by customers, competitors and the media.  Unfortunately Toyota’s reputation for quality has become tarnished due to the well-publicized sudden unintended acceleration problem and the associated recall since October of 2009 of over 10 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles. 

Beginning with certain Lexus models, the first reports to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration of sudden unintended acceleration began in the 1997 – 2000 time frame, with the first recall coming in 2005 and the second in 2007.   One question that’s been raised repeatedly is why did it take so long for Toyota to take definitive action?  It appears now that the quality and safety problems that should have been addressed immediately were stalled somewhere between the Toyota and Lexus dealers and Toyota headquarters in Japan.  Toyota needed something more than Jidoka.

Zenjidoka is a new word meaning "Total Jidoka." Instead of confining Jidoka to the factory floor, Zenjidoka extends Jidoka to every employee who has any contact with the customer.  When an employee hears directly or indirectly about a customer problem, that employee is empowered to use their knowledge, skills and judgment to immediately take action, even if that action means going against company policy or procedure.

In Tokyo, I was at the Haneda airport early in the morning in a restaurant when I noticed an orange and a banana on the counter.  I ordered both the orange and the banana but I received a glass of orange juice and the banana.  I told the waitress I wanted the orange not the orange juice, for I was afraid that the juice might also come from a can.  She quickly told me that she was not allowed to sell the orange to me.  She even giggled to her fellow worker how silly I was to want to buy a fresh orange.

With Zenjidoka employees thousands of miles away from corporate headquarters have the trust of management to make timely and necessary decisions to solve customer problems.  This unprecedented level of management respect has two powerful effects:

1. The immediate attention to a customer’s problem by the first person contacted becomes a competitive advantage, building long-term customer loyalty, and creating a word-of-mouth grapevine that’s more effective at winning new customers than any marketing, advertising or incentive campaign. 
2. This unprecedented level of management respect for the skills and judgment of the customer-facing workforce builds employee self-confidence, loyalty, and most importantly, self-reliance.   

Self-reliance might seem like an old-fashioned concept in this age of Google, where help is a click away.  It might bring to mind a pioneer or explorer who is hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from any help and must confidently rely on their knowledge, skill and self-confidence to overcome a life-threatening situation.  In the context of Zenjidoka the danger is not to the individual, but to the company.

If we just look at the financial impact of Toyota’s sudden unintended acceleration problem, (not forgetting the emotional impact of the resulting injuries and deaths), the cost to Toyota will be measured in the billions, if not tens of billions of dollars, including:

• The cost of recalling and repairing over 10 million vehicles
• $48.8 million in fines levied by the US Government
• Multiple product liability lawsuits, the first of which cost Toyota a reputed $10 million
• Class action lawsuits by investors due to loss of share value
• Lost market share
• Loss of potential sales to competitors
• The cost of sales incentives
• The cost of public relations, marketing and advertising campaigns to overcome negative consumer perceptions

What if Zenjidoka had always been a part of the Toyota culture?  What if the first Toyota employee to hear a customer complain about sudden acceleration was empowered by Toyota with the self-reliance to blaze a problem-solving trail all the way to the office of the Toyota President in Japan, and was celebrated by Toyota management for doing so? 

I was in a Harada Method workshop in Osaka, Japan on March 11^th. (This was the date of the 9.0 Sendai earthquake and tsunami.  The building we were in shook and swayed for around five minutes. I knew this was a big earthquake but I had no idea it was as large as it was. I have been to Japan 78 times and had felt many earthquakes. So with very little knowledge of the overall damage done by the earthquake and tsunami, we continued on with the workshop as if nothing bad had happened.  It was not until days later that we recognized what a terrible tragedy had come to Japan.)

Prof. Takashi Harada and Hidekazu Moriyuki taught the workshop.  Mr. Harada is a former middle-school teacher who is now revered as a genius in Japan at helping people develop the skills to define and accomplish meaningful, rewarding and self-fulfilling personal goals.  In his own words, the Harada Method is a means to achieve self-reliance.

During the workshop, Mr. Harada told us this story, “Uniqlo is one of the fastest growing clothing store chains in the world where you can buy fashionable clothing, well made, at very reasonable prices.  The stores are filled with merchandise up to the ceiling, all arranged perfectly, folded neatly and properly displayed.  A woman shopper carrying a baby came to a Uniqlo store and asked to use the store phone to call a doctor for her child.  The clerk was very apologetic and told the woman that the company’s policy manual forbid the use of company telephones by customers.  In desperation, she went next door to call an ambulance. Later she wrote to Tadashi Yanai, the president of Uniqlo, to express her anger and frustration.  Fearing negative publicity and personally ashamed by the incident, Mr. Yanai called Mr. Harada requesting that he teach Uniglo employees self-reliance. Now after the training, Mr. Yanai’s employees have learned to balance the needs of customers with the needs of the company, and now have a sense of pride and accomplishment when they do the right thing, even if it goes against company policy. 

On the flight back from Japan, I told the flight attendant that the “fish” was not good. She apologized but told me to write to the company to complain that she could do nothing for the company would listen to customer but not listen to her.

I can’t count the number of times over the course of my lifetime that I’ve experienced a problem with a company’s product or service, reported that problem, and heard one or more of the following:

• We’ve had no reports of that from other customers.
• You must be mistaken.
• You’ll have to call…..
• Are you sure you didn’t…..?
• You’ll have to speak to a supervisor.
• I’m not authorized to help you with that.
• I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.

You can probably add to the above list. If you’re like me, on hearing this kind of response, you probably feel frustrated and angry and wonder how such a company can stay in business in this era of Angie’s List, Consumer Reports, and a seemingly endless number of customer rating websites.  Why aren’t the people who operate the cash register, or answer the phone, or sit behind the counter empowered to help solve customer problems?  Why must a problem be elevated to a manager or supervisor?  Why aren’t customer service employees trained and encouraged to be self-reliant, to make the decisions necessary to address customer problems?   

How can Zenjidoka address this absence of self-reliance, and make customer service a competitive advantage?

Imagine an automobile owner who goes to the service desk at the dealership and reports a problem, describing the symptoms in detail to the customer service representative.  If the service desk employee sees the same or similar symptoms in the dealer’s or the manufacturer’s database, the representative knows what to tell the customer and what to do to get the problem solved.  But if the symptoms were not in the database, the customer service representative would take responsibility for the customer’s problem. The representative would be the key point person for this set of symptoms, and would be able to call on other technical, safety and quality resources within the company to verify and solve the customer’s problem. The representative would not immediately defend the company but would be on the customer’s side and enter the symptoms and raise a red flag in the database.  This process becomes the Zenjidoka equivalent of pulling the red cord, the service worker relying on a combination of procedure and self-reliance to find the best approach to solve the customer’s problem. 

A few months back, in the midst of playing musical chairs with medical specialists, I was referred to an endocrinologist on staff at the medical clinic in Vancouver, Washington that I’ve been going to for a number of years.  He told me that I needed to have an operation to remove one of my thyroid glands.  I didn’t like the idea of having an operation, and wanted a second opinion.  I’d recently read nearly 200,000 deaths occur annually from hospital errors and I did not want to join that statistic.  I also read that last year Rhode Island Hospital doctors operated three times on the wrong side of the brain.  Toyota is not the only one that makes mistakes.  I went for another opinion to a new doctor at the Oregon Health and Science University and met with Jessica, a second year resident.  I thought she was very good and told me about a new medication. Before prescribing it for me, she said, “I want to consult with my mentor, the chief resident.”  She left for a moment and returned with her mentor in tow, who complimented her on her recommendation and I left with a prescription.  Now Jessica could have written the prescription without consulting the chief resident. She didn’t need approval.  However, she had learned in her training that a team often makes the best medical decisions, even if that team is just two people.  This helps saves lives, prevents medical errors, and lowers the cost of health care.

Zenjidoka is not an approval system.  The customer service worker is drawing on other resources to help solve the problem. The idea is to bring in others with different perspectives, different skill sets, to help find new ways to solve problems.  No one, even the most experienced manager or executive, has all the answers.  In this way Zenjidoka removes the fear from asking the questions, and the “ego” that drives some managers and executives with the need to be “right”. 

The self-reliance of Zenjidoka is the knowledge, skill and self-confidence to make the right decision to help the customer with their problem. But Zenjidoka is also “selfless-reliance,” the reliance on others to help solve that problem. 

How do we get people to be self-reliant?  Earlier in this article I mentioned Takashi Harada, the genius who has been helping Japanese Corporations answer this question.

I am as enthralled with the Harada Method, to teach self-reliance, as I was back in the early 1980’s when I first met Dr. Shigeo Shingo and Mr. Taiichi Ohno, the geniuses that developed the concepts that we now call Lean Manufacturing.

Mr. Harada was a track and field coach in perhaps the worst middle school in Osaka, Japan. He felt that most of the students were despondent, not having much hope for their future and not believing they could achieve athletic success.  He was troubled by the lack of enthusiasm and absence of motivation of his students and decided to impose some discipline, insisting that the students come to class on time, practice as he directed, and do their homework every night.  The students complained that too much were being asked of them. The parents agreed and scheduled a meeting with the school principal and Mr. Harada.  The parents confronted Mr. Harada during the meeting; he told them that to be successful in life, their children must learn discipline.  He went on to tell them that if they gave him three years, the parents would see the school’s athletic program go from the worst to the best in the city.  He concluded, “If I don’t succeed then fire me, but at least give your children a chance to succeed.”

Mr. Harada had noticed that there were schools with coaches that were able to succeed year after year and with that awareness he felt it was the coach, not the students that determined the school’s success. He felt that with the right method, he could bring out the very best from the students. The principal and parents agreed to give him the three years to see if his method would work.  As promised, three years later, his school went from the worst to the best - that was out of 380 schools, and stayed the best for the next six years.  It was an amazing feat for Mr. Harada to see how inspired the students could become and to watch them put in the necessary effort top succeed. And, 13 of his students won gold medals in their track and field discipline.  The gold medal represented the best student at his/her age level in all of Japan.  It was like the students had won an Olympic medal.  Each student was taken through the Harada Method to become self-reliant, and taught to work out his and her own personal plan for success.  They were taught how to be self-reliant.  Not only was the school rated highest athletically but also the entire school was lifted academically.  The children learned to establish their own goals, to work out their own plans to attain their own goals, to evaluate their own progress towards those goals, and to do the necessary work to develop themselves to achieve those goals.   It is an amazing story and I am dedicated to teaching the Harada Method to the West.

In the next article, I will talk about the groundbreaking Harada Method and how it has helped build the self-reliance of middle-school students, teachers and corporate employees. I am honored to co-author a new book with Mr. Harada.  I’ll demonstrate in the next article and in the new book the Harada Method and show how it has had a profound bottom-line impact in Japanese corporations as Dr. Shigeo Shingo and Mr. Taiichi Ohno did with the concepts that we now call Lean Manufacturing.