Shoichiro Toyoda visits the U.S.

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http://www.detroitnews.com/apps/pbcs...710160354/1148

Shoichiro Toyoda's visit to the United States appears well timed, coming after a string of troubling headlines about the Japanese automaker's U.S. operations.
The honorary chairman of Toyota Motor Corp. and a member of the company's founding family, Toyoda is scheduled to receive one of the auto industry's highest awards tonight in Dearborn, an induction into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
Toyoda, 82, will travel next to southern California, where he will have an opportunity to speak with some of Toyota's U.S.-based managers and gauge the mood at the Japanese automaker's American operations.
Concerns about strains at Toyota's U.S. sales headquarters in Torrance, Calif., surfaced last week after one of automaker's most promising U.S. executives resigned, in the second high-level defection by a high-ranking American in two months.
Jim Farley, general manager of Lexus, left to take a big job as the top marketing executive at Ford Motor Co. His resignation followed the departure in September of Jim Press, president of Toyota Motor North America, after 37 years with the company.
Press had been a protégé of Toyoda, who is said to have nudged the company to appoint him to the board in June.
In Toyoda's previous roles as president and chairman of Toyota during the 1980s and 1990s, he led the company's overseas expansion and heightened the emphasis on production quality. Although his current title is ceremonial, Toyoda still wields power and some insiders say he is the most important person in the company.
Later this week, he is scheduled to meet some of the company's U.S.-based managers in Torrance at a dinner at the home of Yuki Funo, the head of Toyota's North American sales operations.
People at Toyota say Press left to take a hands-on marketing job at Chrysler LLC because he wasn't suited to the kind of advisory role that Toyota was reserving for him.
But Farley's departure sparked talk in the industry of tensions between Japanese and U.S. executives in California and between the U.S. and Japanese operations.
A company spokesman disputed the perception that the recent departures, including Lexus marketing chief Deborah Wahl Meyer's jump to Chrysler, signal a trend. "Over the long term, we're not prone to losing executives," said Xavier Dominicis.
Some tensions between Japanese headquarters and local operations are inevitable, say industry experts. "There's always a natural amount of sniping," said auto analyst Maryann Keller of Maryann Keller and Associates in Stamford, Conn.
She says the strains may be increasing now that Toyota is competing against U.S. automakers determined to design and offer better products.
"Life was very easy for the Japanese for the past 30 years, but life's about to get harder for them now that GM, Ford and Chrysler are getting better," Keller said.
Small miscalculations in pricing or design at Toyota are going to be more costly and may generate more finger-pointing.
George Peterson, president of Tustin, Calif.-based AutoPacific, said Toyota staffs its U.S. operations with many Japanese managers to help the top bosses in Japan grasp the local situation.
"There's a pretty big Japanese shadow staff who help with communications back and forth between California and Japan," Peterson said.
But some of the tensions are hard to resolve. U.S. executives tend to get paid more than their Japanese counterparts because of the different wage scales in the two countries. On the other hand, Americans feel shut out of top jobs at Toyota and other foreign automakers.
The strains are also due to the huge importance of the U.S. operations to Toyota's bottom line.
Toyota is now the No. 2 seller of cars and trucks in the United States after General Motors Corp. and ahead of Ford and Chrysler. Analysts say the U.S. market accounts for more than half of Toyota's profit, which totaled $14 billion in the last fiscal year ended March 31.
Toyota's increasing presence in the U.S. market is accompanied by a greater scrutiny of its performance. The Japanese automaker is now embroiled in a public relations flap after being accused of hypocrisy by environmental groups. Toyota is the leader in sales of fuel-efficient hybrids but, along with Detroit's automakers, it is lobbying in Washington for one of the milder versions of U.S. mileage legislation before Congress. That position has angered environmentalists, who had held Toyota up as an industry standard.

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Toyota has always surrounded the enemy.They release more models and more options.They have reached a point where simplicity would serve them in order to continue their reliability reputation.