Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

When Mattel's (MAT) executive vice-president of worldwide operations, Thomas Debrowski, apologized to the head of China's quality control agency Li Changjiang for the massive amount of toy recalls, it drew a lot of criticism for those not familiar with the underlying design problem in the toy industry.

Debrowski said: "Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys."

This wasn't only an attempt to save doing business in China by Mattel, as others have implied, instead, the reason the apology came was because it really was Mattel's fault in the vast majority of toys recalled by the company.

As the company has admitted, of the 17.4 million toys recalled, only 2.2 million were connected to the lead paint problem, which was indeed China's fault. Yet the remaining 15.2 million toys recalled were directly in connection to poor design.

Since 1988, there have been 550 toy recalls, of those, 76 percent were because of problems related to design, while 10 percent were because of manufacturing issues.

As a result, the primary issue won't be solved by making inspections at manufacturer facilites more intense and frequent. While that will help with the 10 percent problem, it won't help with the huge 76 percent problem coming from design.

In other words, manufacturers are receiving the designs to work with, and overall building them correctly according to specifications. If you have inspectors checking the work done in relationship to the design, they won't find anything wrong, as the specifications are being met.

So you have toys sent out to consumers built according to specifications, that are a problem from the beginning, and not identified as unsafe because workers build them as told to.

What this tells us, is the problem with those designing the toys is they aren't thinking in terms of the end user. Magnets in toys have been one of the big safety problems recently. If you ever have had young children and grandchildren, you know when they're young that everything goes into the mouth. In the case of magnets, this is something that should have been easily identified and worked with from the start.  

One simple way of taking care of this would be to get a panel of parents with young children and have them give input on how they feel about the safety of the toy and concerns they may have.

In the case of the cribs recently recalled, watching parents put them together before they were ever sold, would have helped people see that they were being assembled wrong and could result in a baby being smothered.

With this many recalls, it seems there could be much better ways of identifying problems than are currently being used. To me the input of real parents would go a long way to helping solve the problem. Whatever's being done now isn't doing the job.