Akio Toyoda showed me what he's made of today.
The affable chief of the world's largest (and most beleaguered) auto maker provides an impromptu tour of the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, here in Nagoya, Japan.
He is well-qualified because the repository is populated by the handiwork of his great-grandfather, Sakichi Toyoda, inventor of the automatic loom.
Akio and I crossed accidently paths en route to meet each other. He was scheduled to explain the transformative effect of Toyota's new quality initiative and I was set to be skeptical.
But he paused in front of a display dubbed "Type-G," an 86-year-old, still-functioning loom he described as the "symbol of quality assurance" for the auto maker that bears his family name.
Lovingly, he cradled a wooden "shuttle," the lynchpin of the loom's innovative design. A dagger-shaped device, it automatically replenishes thread to ensure steady production.
Sakichi sold his design for a king's ransom (in 1924 yen) which later served as capital to start up Toyota Motor Corp.
Not coincidentally, the Type-G loom also enabled Sakichi to increase efficiency because one worker could monitor up to 50 machines instead of remaining stationed at a single, hand-operated unit.
Ironically, such expansion contributed to quality oversights that led to a seemingly never-ending string of recalls that have kept Akio tied up in knots during his first year as the auto maker's top executive.
But he remains unfazed, saying he never considered resigning.
“Because every Toyota car has my name on it, I have to lead the way," he said later. “I want people to understand the real Toyota."
Clearly a man cut from sturdy cloth.
