The Monkey Shack

On Monday, three top executives announced their retirement from Toyota. One of them was Mitsuo Kinoshita, one of the primary architects of the company's global expansion the past two decades. Incoming president Akio Toyoda, grandson of the man who founded the company, plans to focus on abandoning kakushin, or "revolutionary change," current president Katsuaki Watanabe's term for changing the way Toyota designed its cars and factories. It spawned technological advances, but in Toyoda's opinion led to cars that were often costlier to produce.

Toyota is struggling through the global recession that seems to have a bulls eye planted squarely on the backs of automakers. Though Toyota is in a stronger position than GM, it still forecasts a loss at the end of the fiscal year March 31. The company is stockpiling unsold cars in of Fuji Speedway and is moving forward with plans to shutter factories in both North America and Japan.

Watanabe spoke often about innovation kakushin, kaizen (continuous improvement) and kaikaku (revolutionary change). A corporate philosophy built on those principles pushed Toyota to become the world's largest automaker and earn a reputation for the best and most reliable cars in the world.

Now they seek to distance themselves from those philosophies and focus instead on thrift and efficiency. Only time will tell if abandoning some of the core principles will help Toyota stay afloat and reemerge out of the recession even stronger, or if they will only sacrifice what decades of work has built and impede the company in the long run.