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Weaknesses and Mitigation Strategies

As the world's largest automaker Toyota is a large-scale process organization which relies on the "methods of big corporations" (Toyota Annual Report. 2010). The company has been compared favorably or unfavorably depending on one's opinion to the former number one global automaker; "Toyota is big and bureaucratic but also highly effective, think of the company as a General Motors that works" (Ingrassia, P. January 5, 2009). The company over the past decade has grown insular in its management style relying on the inner circle of Japanese executives to manage an ever increasing global enterprise. This is evident in the statement of President Akio Toyoda in the 2010 Annual Report when he articulates that the company "was born as a venture business and that spirit has contributed to its growth over the years" (Toyota Annual Report. 2010). "One pressing need for Toyota is to develop a new generation of talented and trusted local leadership in the many countries where it operates" (Ingrassia, P. January 28, 2010) With changes to the management structure and diffusion of responsibility to its global chain of management the company can "reawaken the creative spirit in their employees and accept the challenges of facing a new future" (Toyota Annual Report. 2010).

A piece of this organizational structure weakness, the corporate culture, was responsible in part for the impact and disruption of supply chain and production which led to safety concerns and recalls. "Three or four years ago senior Honda executives demanded to know from their underlings how arch-rival Toyota could expand its production and sales so quickly and still keep its quality intact" (Ingrassia, P. January 28, 2010). The answer of course was that the company could not sustain this trajectory and that they simply had "tried to get too big, too fast" (Ingrassia, P. January 28, 2010). With the booming world economies in the middle part of the decade particularly in China and India, and with the U.S. Automakers facing financial challenges, Toyota saw an opportunity to grow rapidly around the globe. In doing so the company abandoned one of the shibboleths of its conservative culture: never building a new