I'm going to go off topic here, and I apologize ahead of time. I assure you I am well over this. I'm just expressing thoughts that were years in the making and it seems to be time for me to express them.
Toyota/Lexus expected their demographic to come back in 2-3 years and upgrade to a new vehicle. It was the perfect storm back then and fueled growth in the company and economy. Their paint didn't need to last more than 5-years, really. And back in 2001 there were governance stats that showed US auto sales were on a 7-year pattern of >20% lease rate. I am not saying I am 100% correct, nor can I prove it but the data is out there for sure and I am a good synthesizer of information.
How do I know this was even remotely possible? Lean-Sigma.
Toyota INVENTED Lean-Sigma as a way of encapsulating approaches to identify and eliminate waste in everything a company does, and I mean everything.
Waste in production lines, waste in product development, waste in managing people and assets, waste in communicating, waste in producing an invoice or paying an invoice. "Re-engineering" was THE buzzword around 2001. GE, Motorola, etc.... they all used these approaches, tailored them as needed to improve their operations. It was fantasic, entire legions/groups were established in companies giving people jobs roles that never existed before.
However, too much of anything is not a good thing, and when you take re-engineering to a very large degree there are both positive and negatives:
Positives --> you improve product quality and customer satisfaction, improve employee safety and morale, produce more widgets per hour and over time reduce cost to produce products and services.
Example: When your Motorola cell phone was defective (back in 2001 they had most of the market), customer received a replacement and the device was not repaired, it was destroyed. It was a quick phone call, no questions asked. It was more cost effective to invest in building new phones and gear up for the next model phone rather than "waste" effort to repair and resell what is likely a model on the verge of being discontinued soon.
Many people were shocked at this, and then quickly realized it was a fantastic and innovating approach with this Lean-Sigma "thing". Why repair something that is going to be replaced in a year or two anyway?
Example: Does anyone remember the news articles in 2004-2006 where whole computers were being shipped to countries with weak environmental laws and literally dumped in piles to rot? Boy that worked out well for the companies that sold this scrap to "distributors" that did the dumping.
Negatives --> Alienating a critical constituent required to keep the business alive; a customer, employee and/or a shareholder.
Example: That pile of computers leeched lead into the ground and groundwater of those undeveloped countries, infuriating governments and people, forcing them to go on the offensive and stop these practices; not to mention the toxic cleanup and health problems that ensued (which include death).
Example: Outsourcing production, manufacturing and services out of the USA so fast that the primary benefit was financial optimization moreso than service optimization. What was bad was the goals were not balanced well enough and risk management just wasn't happening as fervently as the movement of real estate and people. Shareholder won, India employees won, US employees lost, customers lost. Many companies Leaned too fast alienating customers to say the least.
I still, to this day, remember speaking to a Dell Commercial Business customer service rep who was clearly in India with his/her thick accent and hard to understand, with the name "Fred" or "Bob" (hilarious), unable to solve my problem for 2 days and unable to understand everything I was saying; working from scripts asking basic questions and not listening to me saying I already performed those steps. I had to tell this person to forward my call to the United States for the next tier of support; which after that the problem was solved within 20 minutes after the transfer. Two years later Dell moved their Commercial Business call centers back to the USA. LOL
Example: As an executive in IBM, I once had to resolve a conflict with a support team (in IBM) that flat out refused to call the customer to work on a technical problem the customer had with IBM supported gear. Neither the customer nor IBM could solve on their own and they both were at a dead-end. I knew if they worked together the problem would be solved quickly and the customer would be able to get back to normal operation. However, the optimizations IBM made in their processes were not "joint" optimizations, and recently implemented. I was specifically told by that IBM team that "client communication" was recently removed from their processes because it was deemed to be a non-value-added step in their ability to process and close their trouble tickets. Huh? Seriously? Then explain why the service level was missed because the ticket is not yet closed? Oh! You can't. Then why not make the phone call simply to save your precious service level metrics for the month because I am being measure on client satisfaction, and the client is not satisfied yet? LOL
----Now back to the matter at hand......
I never owned a Lexus but in 2001 I knew a few folks who had them. Mechanically speaking they were hit or miss. You just didn't have one problem with a Lexus - you had PROBLEMS.
Years later we see their parent company getting hit with massive fines and such for poor quality, tens of millions of recalls, corruption, etc.... They got complacent and caught with their pants down, at a time when governments and people were no longer willing to accept this type of behavior and started to look for it. It was always there.
