Semper Vigilo

"Toyota Accused of Skirting Quality"

Toyota has been in the news recently for an unprecedented (for them) series of recalls.
If you subcribe to LinkedIn (and there are many reasons you should, but that is the subject for another post) there is an excellent thread under the Lean Six Sigma LinkedIn group which discusses possible causes and effects, if you want to gather some deeper insights.

I bring up Toyota to make a point, which is summed up in the title of this post: Quality requires that we all be forever vigilant. This is not entirely metaphysical - (engineer alert) the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time. Layman's transaltion: for anything left to itself, the amount of disorder will increase.... anyone who has children will intuitively understand this principle even if they never had a science class.

What this means for those of us tasked with improving quality is that it takes constant watchfulness and corrective action just to stay even much less improve. Even an organization with the history, success, methodology, and expertise of Toyota can fall if thir commitment to quality is not total and continual.

Improving quality requires that we be ever vigilant. Never settle, and never relax your standards. As soon as you do you will accelerate the along the road to disorder.