Page 34 - Toyota Under Fire

THE MOST ADMIRED COMP ANY IN THE WORLD

inventor tinkering with looms in an obscure rural village outside
Nagoya, Japan, in the late 1800s.
So how did Toyota rise from the rural rice fields of a backward,
unindustrialized country to the top of the world, the vantage
point that made its fall from grace so shocking? That history
is not just a curiosity. Indeed, understanding the underpinnings
of Toyota’s success is critical to understanding what happened at
Toyota from 2008 to 2010 and how it acted and reacted under fire.

From Humble Beginnings

Toyota was born out of the tinkering of Sakichi Toyoda, who
grew up the son of a poor carpenter in a region of rice farmers.
In the late 1800s, as Japan was trying to catch up to the industri-
alized nations after over 200 years of being closed to the outside
world, the Japanese government encouraged the growth of small-
scale manufacturing across the country. This included village and
even home-based mills. The women of Toyoda’s family were in-
volved with weaving—at the time a difficult, labor-intensive pro-
cess undertaken with manual looms, using technology that had
not changed much in a century.
Just like the inventor-heroes of Western lore, such as Alex-
ander Graham Bell, Charles Babbage, James Watt, Guglielmo
Marconi, Louis Pasteur, and Thomas Edison, Sakichi Toyoda
tinkered in his workshop for decades, refining his loom designs
by trial and error, hoping to ease the manual labor of his female
relatives. His first manual wooden loom in 1891 immediately re-
duced that burden by using gravity and a foot pedal to move the
loom’s shuttle back and forth, doubling productivity. Over the

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