Toyota has 1 million suggestions per year

http://moneycentral.msn.com/companyreport?Symbol=TM

Toyota has 300,000 employees as shown above. Last sunday, 29th May, 2007, there was an article about handling suggestions. As usual, these management articles are excellent but are rarely carried out even in seemingly successful companies as far as financial figures are concerned.

Toyota is well know for its quality and efficient productivity. It is surprising to me to find that it has on average of 3 suggestions per employee per year, formalised(i.e. recorded).

Many weaker companies won't match that figure. Usually when a company is in trouble, the number of suggestions will increase. For example, in the case of IBM under Gestetner, he himself accepts suggestions via email from employees.

Malaysian will assume that the number of suggestions in their companies are much larger than officially recorded because it is in their culture to consider suggestions in secret talks but if we take these informal suggestions into account, the number for Toyota will be even larger. After all, they also have the asian mentality. The number of informal suggestion should be 3 times as large as the formal ones because many people don't bother or are not capable of writing down their suggestions, or suggestions that are just half baked.

In many companies, making formal suggestion can be disastrous because they can be deemed to be a challenge to the top management. Even if you make suggestions, expect your ideas to be stolen from you without any chance of any recognition. Even worse, your ideas are deemed as failures even before they are tried.

It may be strange, but it is common that many people will say that they cannot do certain things, without even attempting to do them. You can only know if you have tried and actually failed.

Actually, when you try anything, you will always succeed although you may have failed many times, but then nobody get success without any failure in between. This is out of topic already, but it shows that all ideas are correct.

The only differences between ideas are their correlation with management objectives and styles. For a well known high quality company such as Toyota, their employees should be aware of management objectives and yet they still produce so many ideas.

Mismanagement Experiences

Most books talk about good management practises and or how they manage to turn bad management practises into sound managment practises.

In real life, bad management is practised daily and proudly without it even be corrected until the company collapsed or still survive but its potential not realised fully.

An example is the case of training employees to respect customers to the point of making them always right, but in the end, twisted it to mean, the boss as the most important customer.