Page 254 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

taneously identifying and eradicating weaknesses. That’s a fair
description of Akio Toyoda.
None of this is to suggest that a good culture is a static cul-
ture. One step that Toyota has taken recently to invigorate the
culture with outside influence is the investment in and collabo-
ration with Tesla that was announced in May 2010. Toyota is
already learning lessons by seeing its culture reflected in Tesla’s
lens. One of those lessons is about bureaucracy within its de-
sign efforts. Tesla was able to create a concept for an all-electric
RAV4 in less than eight months and have it ready for display at
the Los Angeles Auto Show in December 2010. Several execu-
tives we spoke to suggested that it would have taken Toyota about
two years to do the same. The Toyota design team is now study-
ing how Tesla works on designs to learn lessons about how it can
better incorporate a sense of urgency and rapid development into
its culture.
Toyota board member Yukitoshi Funo, formerly the CEO of
Toyota Motor Sales in the United States, warns that Toyota needs
to continue to embrace greater diversity to continually challenge
its most basic assumptions:

A lesson from the recent issues is that we need a system
to share the potential problems of an intangible nature—
like customers’ concerns and customers’ anxiety, the po-
litical landscape, and economic situations—those kinds
of things we were not able to share across the company.
But in order to create an efficient system to share such
intangible problems, I think you have to take into con-
sideration the culture, mindset, or ethnicity of the team
members. To address both problems—the problem of
information and also the problem of sharing intangible

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