Toyoda: "Toyota's Screw-Ups Look Like GM's"
TTAC’s not the only one wondering when Toyota will stop acting like GM. Last February, none other than 84-year-old honorary chairman Shoichiro Toyoda (grandson of the company founder) upbraided 400 Toyota executives by asking them the same thing. “A person familiar with the meeting” told Bloomberg that Toyoda started out by asking lame-duck president Katsuaki Watanabe, “How many times have you made a mistake?” Then he went on to accuse the group of chasing sales and profits and letting Toyota emulate GM and Chrysler by becoming “addicted” to big cars and trucks while ignoring “the customers’ need to save money.”
This came just a month after the announcement that Toyoda’s son, Akio, would replace Watanabe. Akio assumes his new post tomorrow at a shareholder meeting. And he’ll have his work cut out for him, with Hyundai/Kia nipping at their heels in the economy market around the world, Honda launching an attack on the hybrid homefront, the Texas Tundra plant becoming a black hole when the pickup market crashed, and the Lexus cash cow drying up.
At least someone called them out on it, so they know what they have to do. You can only imagine what could have happened if one of GM’s past chairmen would have had the balls to confront GM’s president and executive leadership like this. Nah, you’re right . . . nothing.
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Some of the comments above are incredible. I think the Toyota Japan website has about 80+ different vehicles listed as currently being in production. Tundra production is about 1.2% of bigT's forecasted global output for 2009, and less than 10% of what they churn out in the US. Don't draw too big a conclusion ("Toyota is the next GM") from such a limited sample. Don't you admire their "mea culpa" for paying out when there's a problem? Nicer than having to get in a big fight with some bad-ass corporate lawyer trying to get them to accept responsibility isn't it?! "Toyota cares about its reputation only as much as it allows them to rest on their laurels and coast by with it. They’ll continue to do so as long as the impression remains that their competition has not caught up with them. If they did care about their reputation, they wouldn’t be in this position now, would they?" - how can such a statement be justified? Anyone worked inside a 100K+ employee corporation and seen it change direction so rapidly? As any oil tanker captain can tell you, you can turn the wheel as much as you like but it's going to take half an hour before the nose of the ship starts to move....