Page 60 - Toyota Under Fire

THE OIL CRISIS AND THE GREA T RECESSION

Every board member is intimately and deeply involved in setting
the plans in the first place, and most will lead the implementation
of some part of the agreed-upon plans.
When the bottom fell out of the car market in late 2008, the
board could not blame Katsuake Watanabe alone for the invest-
ments in expansion like new vehicles and new plants. Those in-
vestments were part of pursuing Global Vision 2010, and that
wasn’t Watanabe’s plan alone; it was the board’s plan. As presi-
dent, Watanabe had some additional responsibility for daily op-
erations, but others, like Fujio Cho, who had preceded him, and
Akio Toyoda, who would succeed him, also were responsible for
the company’s strategic direction. While Watanabe publicly took
responsibility for Toyota’s losses, it was as the voice of the com-
pany, not as a lone ranger CEO who had pushed through an au-
dacious plan and fallen short. So the transition from Katsuake
Watanabe to Akio Toyoda was not the board reacting to the re-
cession. Toyota Business Practices dictates using the “Five Whys”
to get to the root cause of a problem, not the “Five Whos” to find
and fire the guilty party.
But the board equally wasn’t ignoring a $4 billion loss and a
40 percent drop in North American sales. And the Toyota Way
does not allow the company to blame others or even conditions
that are seemingly beyond the company’s control for problems.
The focus is always on finding ways to improve the company so
that even external events can be appropriately handled without
major damage to the company. In this case, the board concluded
that there had been signs before the summer of 2008 that there
was a bubble of high demand and that it would collapse at some
point. For example, Atsushi Niimi, as the executive vice president
responsible for global manufacturing, would not accept the argu-
ment that this was a crisis that was out of Toyota’s control:

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