Word: toyotas
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NASCAR is also tethered to the U.S. auto industry, which has required a massive bailout to save it from destruction. The Detroit Three sponsor teams and races and offer engineering support for the drivers and their crews. General Motors and Ford are among NASCAR's biggest television advertisers. Even Toyota, which controversially entered stock-car racing two years ago, expects a nearly $3.9 billion full-year loss, its first since 1950. An auto failure would be catastrophic for the sport. "The uncertainty of it all is what keeps you up at night," says NASCAR chairman and CEO Brian France...
...good portion of the cutbacks can be attributed to the sport's success. "A couple or three years ago, you had so many new teams coming in," says team owner Rick Hendrick, who fields cars for Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. "You had Toyota coming in with new teams, and there were so many people planning on running multiple teams that the pool of people moving in and being trained just kept growing and growing and growing. It looked like there was no end in sight. All of a sudden, teams can't find sponsors, they shut...
Quite the opposite. Wasteful processes that might have mattered little in a booming economy could doom a company when the economic pie starts shrinking. Take the auto industry. Toyota is weathering the recession far better than its American counterparts not just because it has been making the fuel-efficient automobile customers wanted - though that helped a great deal - but because the Japanese giant makes a fetish out of efficiency. (The term for it in Japanese is kaizen, or continual improvement.) Even Wal-Mart, once environmental Enemy Number One, has made its Byzantine supply chain greener and more efficient - and spreading...
...motivation is a very Asian perception of corporate responsibility. "For each (employee), I believe, the workplace exists not only for earning a living, but also for making friends, growing up and making a contribution to the society," Akio Toyoda said after being named the new president of Toyota Motor in late January. "I'm aware that stabilizing and maintaining employment is an extremely important task of a company." (See pictures of the global financial crisis here...
...seems Detroit cannot cut enough in an effort to drive out the costs necessary to become profitable, the process will reach a tipping point where the U.S. industry will not have enough people to take any real advantage of a recovery of U.S. vehicle sales when that happens. While Toyota and other Japanese companies are cutting back some capacity, they are not going through a process which would essentially gut much of its production ability. As a recovery takes shape, the Japanese company will be able to meet demand without a colossal struggle to get plant after plant back online...