There isn’t a farmer in Canada who hasn’t had a daydream in the last few months that started with, “Now, if I was in charge of Toyota…” The real irony, though, is that for the past decade, Toyota has been one of the few great global companies that has been managed exactly the way that farmers manage their own operations.
Like farmers, Toyota has built a business focused on long-term wealth creation, not overnight gain. Also like farmers, Toyota built its business on a brand promise of affordable quality. In fact, like farmers, Toyota believed that the two strategies — long-term planning and quality production — are not only essential partners, they’re the only two strategies that work.
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It turns out, of course, that the model isn’t perfect. It isn’t saving Toyota from taking a $2 billion sales hit. It didn’t foresee that when a California dealer threw the wrong floor mats into a loaner Camry, it would jam the accelerator pedal, or that when Toyota’s stringent quality-control system identified a possibility for condensation to build up in rare cases and make the accelerator sticky, it would be the stickiness that got all the media attention, not the company’s extraordinary effort to identify and fix it.
Of course, nothing is black and white. Some of Toyota’s manoeuvering has been beneath its ideals. But like farmers who have dealt with BSE and similar issues, we’re confident that the same commitment to planning and quality will restore public faith.
This, however, shouldn’t blind us to the tremendous amount of change Toyota has had to manage in the last few years. Without a perfect ear for how to survive moment by moment, Toyota could never reap the benefits of its longterm vision.
It has, for instance, taken the lead in the development of hybrid cars that it doesn’t altogether believe in because it knows that this is a future that its customers believe in. It has closed hundreds of dealerships but at the same time invested more than ever in training is dealers in how to deal one on one with customers, and it measures and compensates its dealers based on how they do in that regard. It has also positioned itself for a share of booming markets in China and India, among others.
In agriculture, we’ve focused on the efficiency of individual farms as if they operated in a vacuum, almost as if every Toyota factory operated completely on its own. We’re losing our research capability. We aren’t bringing in the best and brightest people.
Fortunately we have commodity organizations with vision. The beef industry gets special praise here, with export initiatives and the Beef Information Centre, and flax growers have risen impressively to their challenges too.
Still, farmers’ challenge is much greater than Toyota’s, and the inescapable truth is that without leadership from the top, many farms will continue the same race for efficiency that has emptied our countryside. Is that the long-term plan we want?
Are we getting it right? Call me at 519 674-1449, or email me at [email protected].
