Naoto Kitagawa: Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work

Naoto Kitagawa was a Toyota chief engineer from 1996 to 2005. His book Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work is the newest and most recent first-person account of the role. He led the bB, the first Toyota car developed with no physical prototypes. His central argument is that the chief engineer system, not the Toyota Production System alone, is the real source of Toyota’s strength. Of the chief-engineer books, his is the one told most openly from the leader’s chair. Where Adachi writes as a documentarist and Hori as a systems engineer, Kitagawa writes in the first person about his own decisions.

For the role in general, see the main guide, What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer (Shusa) System?.

Who Was Naoto Kitagawa?

Kitagawa (北川尚人) joined Toyota in 1976 and began in body design, the usual starting point for a chief engineer. He spent his career in new-vehicle development. He served as shusa and chief engineer at Toyota from 1996 to 2005, then moved to Daihatsu in 2006. His programs included the FunCargo, which he ran under chief engineer Tsuzuki, then the bB, the ist, and the Camry. Toyota had renamed the title from shusa to Chief Engineer in August 1989, during an organizational flattening. The two terms describe the same role across his career.

Why Does Kitagawa Say the Chief Engineer, Not TPS, Is Toyota’s Real Advantage?

Most books credit Toyota’s strength to the Toyota Production System. Kitagawa does not dispute that TPS is one of the great postwar inventions. He argues that it answers only one question. TPS is a system for the how. How to build cars in volume, cheaply, with little variation. It does not answer the what. What car to build, and how to keep creating cars people want to buy.

That second question, in his telling, is answered by the chief engineer. The mechanism that keeps generating hit products is Toyota’s customer-oriented development system, and the chief engineer sits at its center. Kitagawa’s motivation for the book was blunt. Manufacturers around the world have studied and copied TPS thoroughly, so TPS alone no longer sets Toyota apart. What still does is the company’s ability to reliably design vehicles people want. He wrote the book to describe that less-copied half of Toyota.

How Did Kitagawa Develop the bB With No Prototypes?

The director over product planning handed Kitagawa’s team a hard order. Cut the bB’s development cost in half. The team did not set out to skip prototypes. They studied where the cost was and simulated cutting the usual dozens of prototypes to a half, a third, a fifth. None of those reached the target.

When the ideas seemed exhausted, someone calculated the case of building no prototypes at all. That hit the half-cost number. At first it sounded reckless. Toyota’s whole process was built on prototypes. Build one, find problems, fix the drawings, repeat. Finding many problems in a prototype was sometimes treated with respect. Kitagawa turned that on its head. Every problem found in a prototype meant the drawings used to build it had not been complete enough.

So the team pushed the logic to its limit. Predict performance with CAE and other analysis before the drawings were released. Reflect every countermeasure in the official drawings. Check the drawings three times, two weeks, one week, and two days before release, so nothing arrived late and forced a delay. Engineers from evaluation and production engineering signed the drawings to attest their requirements were built in. Some had never signed a drawing before, and Kitagawa says their hands trembled at the weight of it. The work ran through an obeya where design, evaluation, production engineering, purchasing, and suppliers decided together. The bB was, he says, the world’s first prototype-less mass-production vehicle development. It hit the half-cost target.

How Did the bB Reach Young Buyers?

Toyota had fallen behind Honda with young buyers, and journalists were calling Toyota cars old men’s cars. Kitagawa studied where young people gathered, down to a car-audio gathering at Daikoku Pier in Yokohama, where he turned up the second time as the owner of a modified FunCargo. He concluded the bB should not be sold finished. It should invite the owner to customize it.

The launch broke Toyota’s own habits. The official announcement was set for February 2000. The Tokyo Auto Salon, a modified-car show popular with young people, ran in January. Kitagawa decided to preview the car there first, before the official debut, which had not been done before. Toyota’s public relations imposed one condition. The booth and the cars could not show the Toyota name or mark at all. The booth was built to look like a nightclub. Eight aftermarket parts makers prepared custom versions. The event was called “DJ & Club bB Virtual Sound 2000,” with three Tokyo DJs, dancers, and a two-meter stage ringed by customized cars. Because the Toyota mark was absent, the media covered it almost as if a new brand had been born.

The result was the point. In its first month the bB took about 25,000 orders, more than eight times the monthly forecast of 3,000. The aim of recovering youth share was met, and the half-cost target held.

What Are Kitagawa’s Seventeen Principles?

Similar to previous chief engineers Kitagawa sets down his own seventeen principles for the chief engineer, drawn from practice. He says three “hearts” underlie all of them: curiosity, consideration for others, and imagination. The list is a portrait of the role as actual work, not philosophy.

Vehicle planning and development are passion. Keep thinking about the product asleep or awake.
Acquire the ability to arrange work so high goals can be completed.
Have stronger intellectual curiosity than anyone else.
Acquire the ability to express thoughts and ideas clearly.
Build a broad network of people who will help when it matters.
Act as the personnel and general-affairs chief for your own group.
Check drawings honestly, steadily, and thoroughly.
Cultivate the field of cost honestly and steadily, and hit the cost target.
Do not leave selling to the sales division. Think for yourself about how to sell.
Use experts well where you lack knowledge, and never neglect your own study.
Lead by example in genchi genbutsu, going to the actual place and using all five senses.
Practice dialogue-based development with users early. When in doubt, observe customers.
Treat delay in the development schedule as the greatest shame.
Work to develop young people and the next generation of chief engineers.
Be the strongest salesperson for opening a new market, and go to that market yourself.
Never forget gratitude toward everyone who supports you.
Cultivate the physical strength and willpower to fight for long hours.

The list is direct about the less glamorous core of the job. Checking drawings, cultivating cost, looking after the people in his own group, refusing to leave selling to the sales division. These are the parts outside accounts rarely mention.

Can the Chief Engineer System Be Copied?

Kitagawa is clear that the chief engineer works only on top of supporting machinery. Target costing by product, problem-solving discipline, education, schedule management, and a culture in which functional departments cooperate. He recounts a company that tried to install a chief engineer just by giving someone the title, with none of that scaffolding, and got little from it. He also notes there is no chief-engineer school. The role is learned on the job, near other chief engineers, on real programs.

Conversely Kitagawa makes a bolder and more interesting claim in the book. He argues that large American technology companies, Apple and Google among them, have all studied Toyota’s chief engineer system and adopted a version of it as the “product manager” role. This claim is likely true the same way Ford, BMW and other leading automotive companies bench marked Toyota in the past but would could use some further verification from external sources. Traditional product manager roles in America also have roots on companies like Proctor and Gamble and are taught in business schools as well. I’d be curious to learn if Apple and Google have made some claims in public regarding this as that would be a significant achievement.

What Is the Book?

Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work (トヨタチーフエンジニアの仕事) was published by Kodansha in June 2020, in its +α Shinsho paperback series. It is a personal account regarding the work of the chief engineer. Kitagawa walks through the development flow, the organization, the position of the chief engineer, the qualities the role demands, and how the work proceeds, anchored in his own programs. The tone leans toward the leader as hero, which is natural in a first-person memoir, and is part of what distinguishes it from the more documentary accounts by Adachi and Hori.

Where to Buy

Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work is published by Kodansha (+α Shinsho series, 2020, ISBN 978-4-06-520415-3). It is available in Japanese, in print and Kindle, through Amazon.co.jp, Kodansha, Kinokuniya, and other Japanese booksellers.

Art Smalley is president of Art of Lean, Inc.

Naoto Kitagawa: Toyota Chief Engineer's Work