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In February, Toyota announced that its next CEO would be Kenta Kon. He’s the company’s CFO, and for eight years he was the personal secretary to chairman Akio Toyoda.
Some of the coverage outside Japan framed this as a family story. Akio Toyoda’s son, Daisuke, the founder’s great-grandson, was given a role at Toyota’s Motomachi plant around the same time. A lot of people read that as the first step toward the Toyoda family taking back the top job.
Here’s the thing. The real story is more interesting than that. And if you’re a foreign executive trying to read succession signals inside a Japanese company, it’s a story you need to understand.
Let’s start with what actually happened…
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