If it's not the boss's orders or an unfinished job, what brings these Toyota employees together after the workday ends?
Change starts with personal visions
Because the A-1 is a voluntary extracurricular activity, winners do not receive a budget or personnel to get their business off the ground. Whether an idea becomes reality or not depends on the team’s efforts after the contest.
Regardless, even those at the executive level pitch in as judges, eagerly engaging with participants’ ideas and sharing their own expertise.
Chief Digital Officer (CDO) Yoshiyuki Yamashita believes that running the contest after hours is exactly what gives it potential.
CDO Yamashita
The A-1 draws people who truly want to make the world a better place—“fools” in the best possible sense. That’s why we want them to explore topics freely outside company frameworks.
If we committed to pursuing these ideas within the company structure, they would be tethered to things like profits and targets. Though we’re not dismissing such aspects, in the A-1, I want people to embrace their personal visions.
Working toward your own goals in your own time. Transforming not Toyota, but yourself.
Ultimately, this may end up creating new value for the company and the world.
A place to take on challenges and make mistakes
Instead of relying on company structures, start by changing yourself. This message was also emphasized by Yohei Shimanuki, an HR staff who was one of the A-1’s originators.
Shimanuki, Human Resources Div.
Contributing to society through carmaking—Toyota has done this ever since its founding, creating various structures in the process. I see this as one of Toyota’s great strengths, and the A-1 organizers strongly embrace the company’s values.
At the same time, having well-established structures means that few people get a chance to break out of their shells. Stepping outside these structures and realizing their ideas through the A-1 will likely lead to personal growth and new value creation.
These extracurricular activities are unique in that they connect diverse groups of people who wouldn’t normally meet in their daily work and enable them to tackle everything from planning to execution.
In past labor-management discussions, we discussed taking on challenges and making mistakes. However, when manufacturing cars for customers, mistakes are often not an option.
As an extracurricular activity, the contest hopes to provide a chance to take on new challenges without fear of failure.
When the A-1 was launched, Chairman Akio Toyoda (then President) used the phrase “step up to the plate,” inspiring the founding members to embark on an entirely novel endeavor.
They envisioned a platform on which they could go beyond assigned duties to enact their ambitions for making a better world; a way to create new value outside of work hours without relying on existing structures.
Drawing like-minded peers from various corners of the company—including administrative support, product planning, operational improvement, design, and procurement—the A-1 was born.
It is a contest that has the potential to create novel value for the world. And the winning idea for 2023 was already starting to take shape.