He was corrected right there on the factory floor, and he still tells the story. He comes from finance and now spends much of his week visiting factories because he admits he is still learning how to look at them.
A few months ago, while touring a plant, Kenta Kon stopped in front of a workstation. He looked at it and said it seemed possible to perform the task faster.
The operator standing there did not answer. He looked uncomfortable. One of the production veterans accompanying the visit did speak up: there was no need to speed things up. The pace was determined by the next process.
Kon tells the story that way, without polishing it too much. He saw a task and thought it could be done faster. Then he understood that it could not: if the part is finished before the next process needs it, it simply sits there waiting. At Toyota, that is already waste.
But something else from that visit stayed with him even more.
“The operator couldn’t tell me directly,” he admits. Then he immediately adds: “I still need to get better at asking questions.”
Since April 1, 2026, that man has been president and CEO of the world’s largest automaker.
Kon is 58. He was born and raised in Niigata, played bass in his school music club and joined Toyota in 1991. His career was far removed from the classic image of someone destined to run a car manufacturer: he spent most of it working in accounting and finance.
In April 2020, he was appointed chief financial officer. He started the job with factories halted by the pandemic, dealerships closed and supply chains disrupted around the world. Then came component shortages and U.S. tariffs.
He also spent some time at Woven by Toyota, the subsidiary that works on software and is developing the group’s experimental city. It was a short stint, but Kon still talks about it. After so many years inside Toyota, he says it was the first time he was able to look at the company from a little distance. It also helped him better separate two things that until then had been closely intertwined in his mind: the company and Akio Toyoda.
In April, he replaced Koji Sato, who moved into the vice chairman role. Kon thus became Toyota’s thirteenth president and formally joined the board in June, during a shareholders’ meeting attended by a record 9,040 people.
Because of his background in finance, many interpreted his appointment as a sign that Toyota would tighten its control over costs.
Kon now spends much of the week in factories. He visits production, development and logistics sites once or twice a week and tries to visit dealerships once a month. Sometimes he turns up without warning. He says people are usually quite surprised.
He does not describe those visits as a formula. He goes because he still feels he has more to learn. He can walk into a plant, look at a production line and not immediately recognize how much room there is for improvement.
To understand that, he says, he has to go back. Visit another similar factory. Return a few months later and compare.
And when people ask what someone from finance is doing at the head of Toyota, that is often where he begins.
Kon says a balance sheet shows only a period of time. It is useful, but it is only a snapshot. Beneath the figures are years of accumulated knowledge, suppliers that grew alongside Toyota, dealerships, employees and entire cities that do not appear on any financial statement.
At his first press conference as president, he ended up saying something considerably less solemn: that he liked money.
The phrase stuck to his name.
It later emerged that the line had been suggested by Akio Toyoda. Toyoda explained that it did not mean Kon looked only at how much money the company made. Quite the opposite: when Kon looks at a number, he also sees the work of the people who made that result possible.
The persona ended up being useful for Kon.
He admits that he is not very good at breaking the ice when visiting a factory. Now, at least, he has something to talk about.
Before becoming president, Kon had spent eight years as Akio Toyoda’s secretary. He was there for several of the most difficult moments in the company’s recent history.
When he looks back on that period, he does not talk so much about theories as about things he witnessed firsthand.
One happened in March 2011. Toyota had just presented its global vision, and Kon, still deeply immersed in finance, was expecting some kind of profitability target.
Two days later, the earthquake struck.
From Toyoda, he eventually learned another way of measuring the strength of a company. Not simply by how much it earns when everything is going well, but by how much it can withstand when conditions become difficult without suddenly having to stop investments, development or projects that have taken years to build.
From those same days, he remembers a video conference with a plant in Miyagi that had also been hit by the disaster.
Toyoda arrived late. The moderator suggested starting the presentation again to bring him up to speed.
The people at the plant replied that they did not have time.
Toyoda told them to continue.
Kon still returns to that scene when he talks about the Toyota he wants to preserve: a company where someone dealing with a real problem can tell the president that they do not have time to repeat something for him, and the president accepts it.
There is another, much smaller story that he also remembers.
When he had just started as Toyoda’s secretary, he was asked to personally take a gift to the doormen at a hotel. Kon handed the job to the sales department.
Toyoda reprimanded him.
He reminded Kon that the doormen were the first people to greet guests and the last to see them off. They stood outside in the summer heat and the winter cold. If Kon truly wanted to say that he valued people doing work that often went unnoticed, he had to go downstairs and thank them himself.
Kon still tells the story of that reprimand.
His closeness to Toyoda is, precisely, one of the criticisms that surfaced when he was chosen as president.
Kon does not try to deny it. He worked with Toyoda for years and admits that there are still decisions where he finds himself wondering what Toyoda would do.
Nor does he feel he has to distance himself simply to prove that he can make decisions on his own. He says Toyota spent more than ten years bringing decision-making back to the places where the real problems occur, and that process is still continuing.
What he does want is for Toyoda to stop carrying everything himself.
Many of the most important decisions still end up with him, and Kon believes the executive team needs to begin assuming a greater share of that responsibility.
When he spoke about it at the shareholders’ meeting, he became emotional. He said he hopes the day will come when Toyoda can look at him and feel that he no longer has to keep watch over everything.
Kon does not seem in any hurry to move beyond that relationship. He wants to learn everything he can. Perhaps the real change will come when, faced with a difficult decision, he no longer needs to ask himself what Akio Toyoda would do.
Since taking office, there is one word he keeps returning to: responsibility.
First, he looked it up in the dictionary. Then he asked Gemini.
Neither answer quite satisfied him.
