LyrArc Article Gist
The story of Eiji Toyoda is largely the story of the modern Toyota company. He guided the company as president from 1967 to 1982 and following that as chairman and senior advisor, a service that spans the entire period from the formation of Toyota during the 1930's by Sakichi Toyoda and his son Kiichiro Toyoda till today. Eiji was Sakichi Toyoda's nephew, and 18 years younger than Kiichiro. He worked in the company's textile loom business in the early days before the formation of the company to manufacture automobiles as an entrepreneurial venture by Sakichi and Kiichiro. An auobiography by Eiji Toyoda pubished by Kodansha in 1985 tells the story- Toyota- Fifty Years In Motion. Most of the prewar period was spent manufacturing buses and motorized vehicles for the military. It was after visits to Ford's Rouge automobile plant in Detroit in the fifties that Eiji first picked up the ideas for a suggestion system and getting workers to provide ideas and make improvements that later became kaizen. Eiji was born in 1913 before the beginning of the first world war and passed away at the age of 100 in 2013. He lived a remarkable life that witnessed most of the events of the twentieth century, the transition from a militaristic to a peace loving nation, and technological progress in many fields. The technological evolution continues with the development of electric cars. In the early days of the automobile Sakichi had imported a German electric car which was limited by the short battery charge, a limitation Toyota and other companies are still tackling to this day, showing the technological challenges still ahead. The story of Toyota shows pioneering efforts and progress is continuous, as Toyota picked up the ideas from Ford and added new ones of its own for better products. Family companies with dedicated service spanning a century are rare and Toyota is one of these companies. When the recall crisis of 2011 brought the young CEO, Akio Toyoda, Kiichiro's grandson, to the verge of tears at a public event, the memories of a generation of leaders and the need to live up to their ideals and the work that preceded him must have gone through his mind.