And say what you will about Japanese culture, a very similar situation developed in that most American of cultures at NASA.

I suggest to all that one of the best business books you will read is the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s summary volume- it has it all: suspense, high-tech education, amazing detective work, heroes and villians…..and the parallels with this Toyota situation are direct.

http://caib.nasa.gov/

Having lived in Japan (and Okinawa), I can tell you that the Japanese society is quite heritage-driven and, for the lack of a better term, hierarchical. Respect for Elders is paramount, and normally, you would report to someone elder to you that is your boss. Questioning your Elders (and authority, for that matter) is frowned upon in Japanese culture. That’s not saying it’s a closed society by any means – its’ not China . . . but it’s not as open as the United States, either.

The larger issue, to me, is that globalization has led markets to be more and more disparately fragmented; highly decentralized, if you will. Serving them means thinking and establishing yourself in a decentralized manner, not a centralized one (command-and-control hierarchy). Not only do most Boards of Directors not reflect their customer bases (a bunch of 50-yr old+ white guys rarely reflect most target markets), most organizational structures don’t reflect the decentralized traits of their customer segments, either. You can’t see the entire spectrum of color when looking through rose-colored glasses.

When your organizational structure begins to seriously lag your fragmenting consumer/customer base, it’s only a matter of time before the Cobra bites you. Better put, when the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, your days of operating on cruise control are numbered.

P.S. Six-Sigma is part of the problem. Not only did those (6) 9s’ reliability let us consumers down (how many deaths reported at this point?), but Six-Sigma, TQM, Process Improvement, etc. completely ignore the social component of organizations . . . both internally (i.e. informal networks that drive how work ‘really’ gets done) and externally (i.e. consumer markets and their differing behaviors, such as North America versus East Asia versus West Africa, etc.)

P.S.S. I say again – HR can’t change its organizations until it changes itself. “You must be the change you want to see in the World.” – Ghandi

http://learn6sigma.ning.com/profiles/blogs/understanding-toyotas-biggest

Operations should do recruiting and onboarding, there should be a compensation group, and the legal department should handle all compliance, including licensing and offboarding.

Operations should also do training and development- it would probably be a healthy and cost effective evolution to connect operational decision makers to the actual recruitment, training, and development environments.

In these days of pervasive outsourcing, lean manufacturing, resident suppliers, and the whole panopoly of the flat organization, why should HR have a seat at the table, when every seat at the table should have an HR component ?

(Said while wearing my pearls, in my dress, and vaccuuming my floor waiting for Mr. Beaver to come home)