Future First

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Introduction

Winning at the value frontier of the future

Toward the end of the last century, the ninety-three-year-old chairman of Toyota Motors, Eiji Toyoda, expressed a fundamental concern about his company’s business. “What,” he asked, “is the future of the automobile?”¹

Toyoda wasn’t talking about two or three years down the road. His company was already one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. Instead, the aging patriarch was asking something much more profound about the future relationship between cars and the environment. Toyoda wanted to build an environmentally friendly car capable of 47.5 miles per gallon. This was a ridiculously high number at the time; the high economy Corolla got about half that number.

The project, ...