Fabricated inspections of rail-car air-conditioning: Sugiyama resigns and Urutsuma takes on a culture of quality (2021)

The question of “sincerity toward quality”

What this decision forced into the open was a question: however well you build the systems, quality cannot be protected unless the mindset that operates them keeps pace. Mitsubishi Electric had once carried out a “company-wide re-inspection” and still failed to catch the misconduct at its Nagasaki works. That President Urutsuma located the cause not in procedure but in a lack of “sincerity toward quality” can be read as his judgment that the root lay less in a flaw of mechanism than in an organizational psychology that would not bring inconvenient facts to light. Changing the top and creating a new headquarters were an attempt to reach that psychology from the outside.

That said, how far something as elusive as culture can be changed by redrawing an organization chart remains hard to foresee. The vertical, works-by-works way of operating had been Mitsubishi Electric’s skeleton for the hundred years since 1921, and the reform that recast it into the Business Area structure was at once a response to the quality problem and an overlap with the selection-and-concentration of businesses. Whether the cultural reform begun in the wake of crisis stays mere slogan, or takes hold by meshing with the reshaping of earnings and businesses — the answer seems to rest on how a Mitsubishi Electric that has gone on to post record profits confronts the next inconvenient fact.