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Akihiro Wada: Toyota Chief Engineer on the Development of the Shusa System

Akihiro Wada led the Celica, Carina, Carina ED, and Supra over more than ten years as a Toyota chief engineer (shusa), then rose to executive vice president for engineering. His 2008 oral history — a candid, career-spanning interview rather than a written book — is a uniquely first-hand account of how the shusa system works, including his own ten practical rules for the job.

Art Smalley · ·
toyota product-development chief-engineer shusa history

Akihiro Wada: Toyota Chief Engineer on the Development of the Shusa System

Akihiro Wada spent more than ten years as a Toyota chief engineer. He then spent a decade governing the role as an executive vice president. Late in his career he sat for a long oral history, interviewed across his whole career. His account is the least curated and most candid commentary on the position I have come across. He personally experienced the role and then managed others in the position as well. This article outlines how Wada practiced the role: his own ten rules for the job, his read on cost and the market, the calls he made on the first Prius, and how the chief engineer’s approval authority actually worked.

For the role in general, see the guide on the Toyota chief engineer (shusa) system and the encyclopedia entry on the chief engineer (shusa).

Who Was Akihiro Wada?

Wada (和田明広) was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1934. He graduated from Nagoya University in mechanical engineering in 1956 and joined Toyota that year, in body design. He learned the chief engineer’s craft from the inside twice. First he did the body design of the first Crown under Kenya Nakamura, who founded the role. Then he worked the Celica and Carina generation under Tatsuo Hasegawa, who turned it into a system. Wada was a chief engineer for more than ten years, on the Celica, Carina, Carina ED, and Supra. He later rose to executive vice president for engineering and quality assurance. He then became chairman of Aisin Seiki. The rest of this article is the role as he described practicing it.

What Were Wada’s Ten Rules for a Chief Engineer?

Late in his career, as vice president, Wada wrote his own ten rules for the chief engineer. He called them 心掛け (kokorogake), “things to keep in mind.” He wrote them as a deliberate counter to Hasegawa’s Ten Principles. He admired Hasegawa’s set but found it “too lofty, too splendid.” It was a portrait of an all-knowing figure no real person could match. His own are blunt and practical. He insisted they describe how any engineer should think, not only a chief engineer:

  1. Think habitually. Stay curious about everything. Keep widening your knowledge.
  2. Give concrete instructions. Winging it is the most shameful thing.
  3. If a subordinate says “you told me to,” never insist “I never said that.”
  4. While someone explains a proposal, line up your objections. Raise them the moment they finish. Avoid saying yes and then reversing to no later. On a 40/60 call, say yes. Their motivation matters more than the last ten percent of the decision.
  5. No data is less trustworthy than market research. Judge past facts honestly, but study future trends hard. Plenty of cars sold that were said wouldn’t, and the reverse.
  6. Decide fast. Poor deliberation is no better than resting.
  7. Cast a wide net in development, but watch efficiency.
  8. Avoid large meetings. While a meeting runs, consider that work has stopped.
  9. You can’t review every drawing. But the design departments must always believe they’re being inspected.
  10. Develop your chief-engineer assistants. Make the effort to trust and delegate to them.

Hasegawa’s Ten Principles, and how the two sets differ, are covered in the article on the Toyota chief engineer’s principles.

How Did Wada Read Cost and the Market?

Wada’s test for any product was personal. Make something you yourself would want to buy. Even for a car outside his own taste, he asked whether the person who would buy it would actually want it. He pictured that buyer as his own child or his own parent, and judged from there.

He treated cost as the chief engineer’s own knowledge, not the finance department’s. The most important thing for a chief engineer, he said, is to know the price of things cold. He should be able to look at any part and name a price close to right. His example was the 100-yen shop. Go in, pick something up, and work out how it can be made and sold for 100 yen. An executive who says he can no longer be seen in a supermarket, in Wada’s view, has lost the thread of the job.

That market read shows in the car he remembered most vividly, the Carina ED. When the Celica moved to front-wheel drive, the platform let him build a low, pillarless four-door hardtop. It sold explosively and set off a four-door-hardtop boom. But Wada judged from the start that a car selling on styling alone would not last. Nissan, Mazda, and Mitsubishi all rushed out low hardtops. None of them sold. He thought even Toyota’s own sibling versions, built off the Corolla, were a mistake. The segment faded, as he had expected. Reading the market past the hit in front of you is the chief engineer’s job.

Why Did Wada Believe It Was Important to Run Several Programs at Once?

For a stretch Wada carried three programs at once: the Corona, the Carina and Celica, and the Supra. Each was a separate chief-engineer group. He believed no other Toyota chief engineer ever carried that many. He found it energizing rather than heavy. Creating new things is interesting, he said, and doing three is not three times as hard.

Running sibling cars under one chief engineer had a concrete payoff. One person could keep them balanced. He could share a door between two models. He could coordinate where each sat in the market. He could improve one as soon as he improved the other. Split between rival chief engineers, the same cars would breed turf fights, even open insubordination. One would refuse to share a door. Holding them under one chief engineer kept them in proportion.

His view of the role today is pointed. Modern chief engineers run one model and rotate out quickly for the next person, and they say they are busy. Wada’s reaction is that they must have too much time on their hands. He kept his own way of working simple. Never let work pile up. Decide on the spot. Keep a clean desk with nothing carried over. Leave by 6:30 so subordinates could leave too. He also cut large meetings short. Once people had cleared the two or three items that involved them, he sent them back to work. Sitting through the rest of a meeting, to him, was a form of resting.

What Did Wada Decide on the First Prius?

By the time of the first Prius, Wada was the technical vice president. The program shows the chief engineer system working as a chain, not a solo act. The chief engineer, Takeshi Uchiyamada, owned the car. Wada set the challenge from above and made specific technical calls.

The famous one is the fuel-economy target. Wada told the team to double it, and he is precise about why. A roughly 50 percent gain was reachable by carrying over technology already developed at Toyota’s research lab. That made 50 percent too soft a target to force real invention. So he demanded double, to push the team past what carryover could deliver. Privately, he expected the result would land closer to 50 percent. He kept that to himself. (Uchiyamada’s side of the same decision is in the article on building the Prius.)

He also made hardware calls. The team wanted to mount the nickel-metal-hydride battery under the floor. Wada asked what would happen in a typhoon, on a road under 30 centimeters of standing water. He ordered the battery moved to the trunk. He pushed for steering light enough to drop the power-steering pump and save energy. He was also unhappy with the rear styling. He traced it to a real constraint of the role: a first-of-its-kind car that “isn’t the main event” cannot be given the company’s top designer.

What Gave the Chief Engineer Authority, and How Did Wada Use It?

The chief engineer had little command authority over the functional departments. His real lever, Wada believed, was approval. Nothing the engineers produced was authorized to be built until the chief engineer signed off. Wada is emphatic that chief engineers at other companies did not hold this veto over engineering output. It is what set the Toyota shusa apart. But the power was never in checking every page. It was in the competence behind the signature, and in a reputation he built on purpose.

The drawings arrived in stacks. Some mornings ten sheets, some a hundred. The pile stood 30 to 40 centimeters high. He could not read them all, so he worked by judgment. With hand drawings, he opened the messy ones first. A novice or a struggling design usually hid a problem there. Once CAD made every drawing print clean, he read the dimensional tolerances instead. Disordered tolerances meant a disordered design. When he found something, he phoned the department head first. The department head often would not know the answer. Then he worked down to the section chief and the engineer. The whole chain learned that drawings sent to Wada got inspected. “Sending drawings to you was always a hassle,” a retired department head once told him. That was the point. The design departments had to believe they were always being inspected, whether or not he read every page. He used the same scrutiny in person. While an engineer explained a proposal, he built his counterargument. He signed only if he could not find the hole.

The paper signature has faded with CAD and digital workflows. The lever has not. The chief engineer still holds the approval every design has to pass.

What Did Wada Think Makes the System Work — and Fail?

Wada is as frank about the system’s weakness as its strength. He puts both in the same fact. The whole company moves easily on the chief engineer’s opinion. That makes it possible to unify a huge organization fast. It is also, he says, the primary danger. A wrong chief engineer carries everyone down the wrong path. The safeguard is real oversight from the responsible director above. At Toyota, that director was himself an engineer who had risen through the company, so he could judge the call.

Speaking in 2008, he worried that the conditions inside the company were eroding. The company had grown too large. Work had been over-subdivided. CAD had made it harder for a boss to check a subordinate’s thinking. People were not being developed as they once were. He also pointed to something rarely credited from outside. Toyota’s reputation was built as much on durability as on the production system. An important external feedback loop drove it. Every month, dealers compared Toyota’s field data against Nissan’s. They “kicked us in the rear” until the cars stopped breaking. As the cars got good, that loop weakened too. The full list of conditions the system needs is in the main guide, What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer (Shusa) System?.

What Is the Akihiro Wada Oral History?

The Akihiro Wada Oral History (和田明広 オーラル・ヒストリー) is a verbatim record of five interviews. They were conducted between August 2007 and February 2008. The Tokyo University of Science Graduate School MOT Research Center published it in December 2008, in its research series. The editors were Matsushima Shigeru and Odaka Kōnosuke. It is not a book written for sale. It is an academic oral history. Wada answers open questions across his whole career, with the candor of a man speaking after retirement. The volume is held in the National Diet Library of Japan. It circulates in academic and enthusiast circles rather than ordinary retail.

Sources

This article draws on the Akihiro Wada Oral History (和田明広 オーラル・ヒストリー, Tokyo University of Science Graduate School MOT Research Center, 2008), a Japanese-language primary source, together with firsthand knowledge of the Toyota chief engineer system. Quotations translated from the Japanese are the author’s renderings. AI was used in the translation of this article.

Art Smalley is president of Art of Lean, Inc.