Page 131 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

the Toyota Way principle of genchi genbutsu, or “go and see.” The
idea is that decisions should be made as close to the gemba, or
work site, as possible. Thus, serving North America can best be
done from North America.
It’s not enough just to have operations in a particular region,
however. The goal isn’t simply to have someone locally; it’s to
have an organization that is deeply trained in the Toyota Way and
is capable of making decisions and operating according to the
company’s principles and plans. Such an operation cannot rely
on having Japanese engineers and executives constantly traveling
from Japan to “go and see.” Not only would that make significant
growth impossible from a capacity standpoint, but it would ulti-
mately defeat the purpose of genchi genbutsu. The people who are
most knowledgeable about a problem should be the people solv-
ing the problem. That can’t be done by visitors. It has to be done
by the people who live with the problem every day.
For a company whose success is built on hewing closely to a
very specific way of operating and a very specific culture, that is
far easier said than done. For Toyota, before a region can be self-
reliant, that region has to have leadership in place that is as deeply
steeped in the Toyota Way as the leaders in Japan who literally
grew up within the company.
Bucking the trend that has swept most of the world’s com-
panies, Toyota has never relied on outsiders or “new blood” to
run the company. Every president in the company’s history has
spent his entire career working for Toyota. The same is true of ev-
ery Japanese senior executive in the company’s history. The only
exceptions to this rule are the North Americans, Europeans, and
personnel from other nationalities who were hired into the com-
pany as it expanded its operations globally.

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