Collision Course

"On my first day here," recalls Cooper, "Peter knocks on the door, pokes his head in, and asks, 'Do you have an open-door policy?' " Cooper's office is an orderly, serene place, with a massive mahogany desk and soft classical music playing in the background. Even now, Dames's entrance -- with his jeans, dark pullover, and green Simple sneakers -- seems to destabilize the place. But Cooper instantly identified Dames as an ally, and his directness won her trust. "This was a very traditional culture," Cooper explains. "The IT organization was one of the most formal I'd seen, and the people here seemed like they'd been isolated for a long time. I saw that we needed to reinvent the IT organization and to educate the business side about the importance of e-commerce."

To lead the e-commerce charge, Cooper knew she needed someone who wasn't content with the status quo but who "could break the rules while keeping our business goals and strategy in mind." Dames convinced her that he was that person. "I had enough confidence in Peter and his team that I could stay away," Cooper says. "As it turned out, they operate best in a manager-free zone. Peter reports to whomever he needs to. You could say that he reports to the CEO, because when he needs to talk to him, he calls him up. He's got the combination of personality, experience, and attitude that makes me comfortable with that. He understands that the mission isn't to deny the executive body, or to go around it, but to bring it along."

Working with two colleagues, Gen Kanai and Richard Kanno, Dames began laying the groundwork for a corporate intranet that would eventually be called Toyota Vision. The mantra throughout the project was "build it simple, get people using it, then start tackling the heavy-duty stuff" -- like scheduling travel and ordering office supplies online. But Dames was determined to include some e-commerce features early, because he felt that one of the team's most important goals was to get fellow employees to engage in online transactions; how else could they help shape, execute, and support Toyota's e-commerce strategy?

So before long, in addition to seeing a running tally on Toyota Vision of how many Sienna minivans had been sold in North America, employees could see what books were recommended by Yoshi Ishizaka, president of Toyota Motor Sales at the time, and then go ahead and buy them from barnesandnoble.com. They could also buy discounted PCs from Dell through the site, order replacement parts for their own Toyota vehicles, or buy what Dames wryly refers to as "trinkets and trash" -- Toyota-branded hats, golf shirts, and mugs. Employees could also enter their "resource-commitment requests" digitally -- requests for work from another department within Toyota.

"The goal was just to get people comfortable with doing transactions over the Net," says Dames, who regards Toyota Vision as a success, albeit a continually evolving one. "Before long, we started hearing about executives buying books online and teaching their secretaries how to buy books online. We got a call from one department asking if we could put its business-card request form up there." But the intranet project, which CIO Cooper regards as a "proof-of-concept that showed that we could move quickly and deliver quickly," was also an educational experience for Dames's team. "For us, doing the e-commerce parts of Toyota Vision has been useful for learning about security protocols, structuring deals with barnesandnoble.com and Dell, and setting up a storefront," he says.

Still, Dames and his team felt that Toyota's top management was still apprehensive about e-commerce. Why? "Our executives associated e-commerce with selling cars directly to consumers online," he says. They felt that would jeopardize the company's strong dealer relationships, not to mention violate franchise laws in the United States. Dames decided his team needed to help frame the discussion about e-commerce. "We said, 'Let's focus on business-to-business, not business-to-consumer. Business-to-business is the much bigger piece, anyway.' "

Dames knew that the most compelling near-term benefits for Toyota involved digitizing its interactions with suppliers, distributors, dealers, business partners, and even far-flung parts of the Toyota enterprise. That's how the "sneaker meeting" was born. The goal isn't just to get attendees thinking about business-to-business e-commerce but to plunge them into Web culture, and, ideally, to spark some ideas about how Toyota can take advantage of the medium. The e-commerce team invited Ishizaka, then president of Toyota Motor Sales, to the first sneaker meeting in November 1998. That simple invitation violated a deeply ingrained cultural practice at Toyota: nemawashi. Nemawashi means that when you have an idea, you present it to your manager, and if he thinks it's a good idea, he presents it to his manager, and so on, up the organizational chart. Often, ideas get smothered or warped beyond recognition by the time they get to the upper echelons of the company. "We did reverse-nemawashi," says Dames. "We called the president's office and said, 'Can we get an hour with him?' And they said, 'Sure.' "