On all of my drives back and forth between the ATL and the AUB (don’t ask) this week, I kept hearing about the trials and tribulations being heaped on Toyota due to sticky gas pedals, faulty brakes, and general all around failure to move swiftly enough to keep from being just the right whipping boy that American manufacturing has been needing for a long time. It has to be a “funny” place in which Toyota finds itself; I still remember from childhood those slightly unnerving commercials that Toyota used to run that depicted Toyota workers performing calisthenics prior to beginning their daily shift on the factory floor. This kind of behavior led me to believe they were communists, as only pinkos would do anything in such well-choreographed unison. Of course this was years before I was a member of the Hewitt-Trussville Huskies Marching Band. Little did I know that they were simply implementing Philip Crosby’s “Zero Defects” policy of manufacturing.

To my parents, “Made in Japan” meant “substandard, shoddy work.” But in my lifetime “Made in Japan” came to mean “really, really good at making thousands of the same thing over and over again.” For some reason in the seventies we had come to accept mass production as meaning crap that would not last very long. Toyota changed all that. Their idea that you do the best you can today, so that tomorrow you might do better again changed manufacturing in America forever.

So how did Toyota get here? For a company that eschewed American automotive manufacturing strategies, today is remarkably reminiscent of the Ford Pinto scandal of the 70′s – in the end it seems Toyota learned all the wrong lessons. But I am not ready to throw Toyota to the wolves (or the Foxes) just yet. I still do not think there is a better example of “incremental perfectionism.” That is what America manufacturing learned from Toyota: “Every single change should make the whole better, and every day you should change incrementally.” This is indeed how you make “Quality Job One.” Incrementally. As designers I think we have forgotten this to some degree – today we most often see current circumstances as something not yet perfect; the future is simply something to be “fixed.” It is nice to be reminded that this is the farthest from the truth; instead we just do the best we can today. And tomorrow we do better. “Perfect” is indeed our goal, but it is by no means our destination.