What Are the Toyota Chief Engineer Principles? Hasegawa’s Original Ten (主査に関する10ヶ条)

Tatsuo Hasegawa wrote ten principles for the Toyota chief engineer. They are quoted often and read rarely. The first thing to know about them is what they are not. They are not Toyota policy. They are not a job description. They are one man’s private reflections, written in his own hand, marked confidential, late in his life, describing an ideal so high that a colleague who read them said no real person could ever meet it. Read that way, the ten are not a checklist. They are a portrait of what the role demands.

They are also the first of three. Hasegawa wrote his ten before anyone else. Decades later Akihiro Wada wrote a more practical set of ten, and later still Naoto Kitagawa wrote seventeen. This article covers Hasegawa’s original ten in full, and points to the later sets at the end.

This article is a companion to the main guide, What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer (Shusa) System?.

What is the document, really?

The ten principles survive because Akihiro Wada read them aloud, line by line, during his 2008 oral history. Hasegawa had written them by hand. The page Wada held was marked マル秘, confidential. The occasion was modest. A Toyota committee was assembling an internal guide called “中堅エンジニアの心構えと勘どころ,” roughly the mindset and the knack for mid-career engineers. Hasegawa wrote his ten for it. Wada was asked to write his own set alongside, and did.

The timing matters. Hasegawa wrote these well after he had left active management. He had retired as a senior managing director in 1982. By the time he set the principles down he had decades of distance from the daily work, enough to distill what he thought mattered. They are the long view of a man looking back, not a manual handed to a new chief engineer on his first day.

They have a clear author. Hasegawa (長谷川龍雄, 1916 to 2008) was an aeronautical engineer before he was a car man. He designed the Tachikawa Ki-94 fighter during the war, joined Toyota in 1946, and led the Publica, the Sports 800, the first Corolla, the Celica, and the Carina as chief engineer. He turned Kenya Nakamura’s improvised method into a repeatable system and founded the Product Planning Office. His full career is in the companion article on Hasegawa. The aircraft engineer’s fingerprint is all over the principles, as the loanwords and the cost discipline below will show.

John Shook published a summarized English version in his 2009 essay “The Remarkable Chief Engineer.” It reorders the list and renders the items as polished summaries. What follows is the full set with the original Japanese and a literal translation, so the texture of Hasegawa’s own words survives.

Hasegawa’s Original Ten Principles, in full

The document is titled 《ChiefDesigner(主査)に関する10ケ條》. Nine of the ten are statements about how the chief engineer should conduct himself. The tenth is a list of the qualities the role requires. All ten are below, in the order Hasegawa’s handwritten page gives them. (Some later published versions swap the first two.)

I. Have your own plan.

主査は自分自身の方策を持つべし。白紙で腹案なしで「よろしくたのむ」では人はついてこない。しかし始めから出しすぎて相手に考える余地と楽しみをあたえず「俺の言う通りにやれ」でもいけない。少しずつにほわせて信頼感と方向性をあたえよ。

The chief engineer must have his own plan. Showing up with a blank sheet and no idea of your own, saying “please take care of it,” will not make people follow you. But putting too much out at the start, leaving the other person no room to think and no pleasure in the work, saying “do it exactly as I say,” is also wrong. Reveal your intent a little at a time. Give both trust and direction.

II. Cultivate knowledge beyond your specialty.

主査は常に広い智識・視野を学べ。時には専門外の智識、見識が極めて有効なことがある。專門といっても要するに井戸の中にすぎない。専門外の専門が一つあると大変よい。別の見方で問題を見直すことができる。

The chief engineer must always learn broad knowledge and a wide view. At times, knowledge from outside your specialty is decisive. A specialty, after all, is only the bottom of a well. To hold one specialty beyond your specialty is a great asset. It lets you look at a problem another way.

Hasegawa lived this one. His specialty beyond his specialty was aircraft design. The weight discipline he brought from building airplanes, where every gram is fought over, became part of how Toyota approached target cost. The well image echoes the old proverb about the frog in the well who does not know the open sea.

III. Cast a wide net early.

主査は大きく網を張ることを身につけよ。主査は初期のSurveyの段階で如何に「手を打つか」。その方向と規模によって将来の運命がきまることがある。

The chief engineer must learn to cast a wide net. In the early Survey stage, the question is how and where you make your moves. The direction and the scale of those first moves can decide the program’s whole future.

IV. Pour in everything you have.

主査は常に全智全能を傾注せよ。5,000時間級のBigProjectに如何にして自分の総合能力を集中させるか。真剣さが自づからにじみ出る様になると主査の能力の絶対値とは無関係に人がついてくる。体を張れ。始めから逃げ場をさがしていることを人に感づかせるな。

The chief engineer must pour in all his wisdom and ability. How do you concentrate your total capability on a 5,000-hour-class big project? When seriousness begins to show through on its own, people follow you, regardless of the absolute level of your ability. Put your body on the line. Never let people sense that you are looking for an escape route from the start.

Hasegawa makes a real claim here. Commitment outweighs talent. A chief engineer of ordinary ability who is visibly all in will draw more followership than a brilliant one who is hedging. The 5,000 hours is roughly the span of a vehicle program.

V. Do not tire of repeating yourself.

主査は物事を繰り返すことを面倒がってはならない。自分のやっていること、考えていることが果たしてよいかどうかを毎日反省せよ。上に向って自分の主張を何回も繰返せよ。協力者に自分の意図を周知徹底さすため少くとも５回は繰返すつもりでいよ。

The chief engineer must not find repetition tiresome. Reflect every day on whether what you are doing and thinking is truly right. Repeat your case upward, again and again. To get your intent fully across to your collaborators, plan to repeat yourself at least five times.

Three kinds of repetition sit in one principle. Daily self-reflection. Persistent argument upward to management. And repeated communication to the working engineers, with a specific number attached. Say it five times. Hasegawa assumes a thing said once does not stick, and plans for it.

VI. Never blame others.

主査は物事の責任を他人のせいにしてはならぬ。体制を変えてまでしてもよい結果を得る責任がある。但し権限は昔からない。あるのは説得力だけである。しかしもしそれが真実ならば無限の威力をもっていることを知るべきである。他人のせいにして言いわけをいってはならぬ。結果について人を怒ってはならぬ。

The chief engineer must never put the blame on others. He bears the responsibility to get a good result, even if it means changing the structure itself to do it. Yet authority has never existed. All he has is the power to persuade. But if what he says is true, he should know that power is without limit. He must not make excuses by blaming others. He must not berate people over results.

This is the principle everyone quotes, because of the line “権限は昔からない,” authority has never existed, not from the beginning. The role was built without authority on purpose, and why that was done is the subject of its own article, Why Does Toyota’s Chief Engineer Have No Authority?. What is easy to miss, reading only that one line, is the harder instruction around it. You own the result even when the cause was outside your control, and you may not take it out on the people who reported to you.

VII. Hold your conviction.

主査は自分に対して自信（信念）を持つべし。ふらついてはならぬ。少くとも顔色に出してはならぬ。こまった時には必ず妙案が出てくるものである。

The chief engineer must hold confidence, conviction, in himself. He must not waver. At the very least, he must not let it show on his face. When you are truly stuck, a good idea always comes.

VIII. The chief engineer and his staff are one person.

主査と主査付きは同一人格でなければならぬ。主査は管理者ではない。Engineeringに上下があってはならぬ。本質的なことで権限委譲してはならぬ。仕事に隔壁を作ってはならぬ。主査は主査付きを「仕事のやり方」についてしかってもよいが「仕事の結果」についてしかってはならぬ。しかりたい時は自分をしかれ。

The chief engineer and his staff must be one and the same person. The chief engineer is not a manager. There must be no rank within engineering. Do not delegate authority on essential matters. Do not build walls between tasks. You may correct your staff on how they work, but never on the result of their work. When you want to scold someone, scold yourself.

This draws the sharpest line between the chief engineer and an ordinary project manager. The chief engineer and his dedicated staff act as a single unit, with no daylight between them. And the rule on criticism is exact. If the result is bad, that is the chief engineer’s failure to set the direction, not the staff member’s failure to execute. So you scold yourself.

IX. Do not work the angles.

主査は要領を使ってはならぬ。“顔”や”ヤミ取引”や”職権”等々は永続きしない。

The chief engineer must not use clever shortcuts. Trading on your “face,” making “dark deals,” or pulling rank, none of these last.

This is the principle that most directly governs how persuasion is supposed to work. Hasegawa names three shortcuts and rejects all of them. Leaning on your reputation, cutting informal deals outside proper channels, and invoking your position. They might work once. Over a career they erode the trust the role runs on. The chief engineer has to win on substance, because nothing else holds up.

X. The qualities a chief engineer needs.

主査に必要な特性

智識力（点在），技術力（組立て、進展さす力），経験（Levelの設定力）

洞察力，判断力（可能性の），決断力

度量，Scaleが大きいこと。経験と実績（良否共に）と自信より生れる。

感情的でないこと。冷静であること。時には自分を殺して我慢しなければならないことがある。

集中力があること（Power）

活力，ねばり，若さがあること（Energy）

相手をなびかせる力，統率力があること。

柔軟さがあること。ぎりぎりの時にはメンツにこだわらずに転身が必要な場合がある。そのTimingが大変むつかしい。

表現力，説得力。これには一定のFormはない。個性を生かせ。

無欲という欲。

Knowledge, scattered across many points. Technical ability, the power to assemble and to advance the work. Experience, the power to set the level.
Insight. Judgment, of what is possible. Decisiveness.
Magnanimity. Largeness of scale. This is born from experience, from a track record both good and bad, and from confidence.
Not being emotional. Being calm. There are times when you must kill your own feelings and endure.
Powers of concentration.
Vitality, tenacity, youthfulness.
The power to win people over, and to lead them.
Flexibility. At the last moment there are times you must change course without clinging to face. The timing of this is extremely hard.
Expressiveness and persuasiveness. There is no fixed form for this. Use your own individuality.
The desire called desirelessness.

Hasegawa’s own summary of the tenth principle reads 要するに総合能力＋個性、独創性, in short, total capability plus individuality and originality.

The tenth principle is the part almost no English account reports, and it is the most revealing. It is not advice. It is a specification of character. And it ends on a koan. 無欲という欲, the desire called desirelessness. The chief engineer must want nothing for himself, and that wanting-nothing must itself be a kind of ambition. Wada, who read these aloud, called the whole document a description of an all-knowing god. The last line shows why.

What do the principles reveal that the Western accounts miss?

Three things stand out, and none of them is the authority line everyone quotes.

They were written as an ideal, not a procedure. Wada was blunt about it. He found Hasegawa’s set “素晴らし過ぎて,” too splendid, describing a person no one could actually be. That is why Wada wrote his own ten in a deliberately plain register. The honest way to read Hasegawa’s ten is as the shape of the demand, not a list anyone is graded against. No one at Toyota is assessed item by item against them. Their influence is cultural, in what the role came to expect of a person, not procedural.

The tenth principle is a portrait of character. The nine conduct rules get quoted. The qualities list rarely does. Yet it is where Hasegawa says most plainly what kind of person the role needs. Calm under pressure. Willing to change course at the last second without defending his pride. Able to lead and to persuade with no fixed method, using his own personality. Wanting nothing for himself. This is a description of a temperament, and it is harder to build than any skill.

The fingerprint is an aircraft engineer’s. Look at the original. Hasegawa drops English engineering loanwords straight into his own handwriting. Survey. BigProject. Power. Energy. Scale. Form. Level. Timing. He counts a vehicle program in hours, 5,000 of them, the way a project engineer scopes work. The principle about a “specialty beyond your specialty” is his own story, the aircraft man who brought weight-and-cost discipline into car development. The ten read the way a senior technical lead thinks, because that is what wrote them.

How do the three sets of principles differ?

Hasegawa’s ten were the first. Decades later Akihiro Wada wrote his own ten for the same kind of committee, and the contrast is the point. Hasegawa describes who you must become. Wada describes what to do on Monday. Where Hasegawa says pour in your whole being, Wada says know the price of things, decide fast, keep meetings small, own your mistakes. Hasegawa wrote the ideal. Wada wrote the practice. Wada’s set, and the mindset behind it, is covered in What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer Mindset? and in Akihiro Wada — Chief Engineer and the Oral History of the Shusa System.

A generation later again, Naoto Kitagawa, a chief engineer from 1996 to 2005, set down seventeen principles of his own. He built them on three dispositions he held essential: curiosity, consideration for others, and imagination. His is the most operational of the three sets. It is covered in Naoto Kitagawa — Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work.

That three chief engineers across three generations each wrote their own set is itself telling. The role cannot be handed over in a manual, so its holders keep trying to put the unwritten part into words. Hasegawa’s original ten name the standard the role holds you to. Wada’s and Kitagawa’s are how you walk toward it. Where the three converge is examined in What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer Mindset?.

This article draws on the Akihiro Wada Oral History (2008), a Japanese-language primary source that preserves Hasegawa’s handwritten document, cross-checked against independently published Japanese versions of the principles, together with firsthand knowledge of the Toyota chief engineer system. Translations from the Japanese are the author’s renderings. AI was used in the editing of this article.

Art Smalley is president of Art of Lean, Inc.