Toyota has opened its new headquarters in North America, and the grand opening ceremony featured aerial dancers twirling atop polarized glass high above the 100-acre campus in a carefully choreographed mix of precision and risk. It was a fitting tribute to Toyota's $1 billion bet to uproot thousands of workers from techie California to a Texas city whose name means "a flat place" for its barren terrain.
The logic of nestling the regional home of one of the world's dominant automakers amid Plano's headquarters row of financial institutions and insurance companies wasn't immediately apparent three years ago, when stunned Toyota and Lexus workers got the news. Steaming-hot Texas was no match for beachy Southern California and its car culture, not to mention the potential for strained family ties from the move, some workers argued. "Respect your people and their knowledge and experience," a former administrator suggested to Toyota this year on Glassdoor. "They're not replaceable for half the price in Texas."
Amid the predictions of a massive brain drain as the auto industry undergoes a volatile transformation, the Japanese automaker applied its methodical Toyota Way of continuous improvement to pull off a risky dance of its own. Three years after tackling a fragmented organization, Toyota executives say they've consolidated operations from around the country under the roof of One Toyota — the internal name for the project — just in time to confront the disruptive challenges facing the industry.
Of the 3,000 workers in Torrance asked to move, plus another 1,000 at a Kentucky engineering center and 50 at smaller operations in New York, about 75 percent made the trip to Plano. That's an impressive number given that Nissan lost roughly 60 percent of the 1,300 people at its Los Angeles headquarters when relocating to Nashville in 2006. Toyota has quickly found local talent to replace those who didn't move to Texas, hiring 800 people so far, mostly from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, executives said. All told, about 4,200 employees will find homes in One Toyota's seven office buildings and 2.1 million square feet when the last of the stragglers move in by year end.
