Initiative

Initiative means a personal quality that shows a willingness to get things done and take responsibility. An initiative is the start of something, with the hope that it will continue. A person with initiative is motivated to do things. If you take the initiative, you're willing to get things done on your own. Taking initiative can be risky: If you do something on your own initiative, then there's nobody you can blame if it goes wrong.

Akio Toyoda is one of the successful entrepreneurs in the world to rescue Toyota when Toyota had coped remarkably well with the tsunami and that the recall crisis had served as a wake-up call for a company grown complacent. Akio, the grandson of the company’s founder was been a young president at the head of the company who was effectively born into the job and has little experience in crisis management. 

Although he knew that himself is just has little experience to control the whole company but he believe himself can do it by showing initiative to let him job done. 8 millions of Toyotas involved into the recall crisis in year 2009 until 2010. It is because there are the reports showed that Toyotas involved in horrific accidents cause by that ran out of the control and could not be brake to a stop. Besides, another problem occurs after the recall crisis. The tsunami damaged plants in the north of Japan, disrupting the supply of over 500 parts and Toyota could not find any replacement. 

By solving the problems, Akio assembled general managers of departments such as body engineering and powertrain in Japan and took the unusual step of instructing them to restore production and not waste time reporting upward. They sent two-man teams of engineers to visit each supplier plant and to identify and locate backup parts until the suppliers were running again. Lastly, Toyota solved the problems in half the time expected by the leading of Aiko but they suffered a lost 800,000 production units which equal to 10% of its annual output. 

In conclude, Akio solved the recall crisis and tsunami problems by his good entrepreneur traits which is initiative.

(Logo of Toyota and Akio Toyota)