Happiness for All— Part 1
Besides their religious significance, the holidays give us pause to reflect on the past year and think deeply about our most intrinsic values and hopes.
Taking this opportunity, I’d like to end this year by beginning a series of blog posts to discuss Toyota President Akio Toyoda’s aspiration for Toyota to be, first and foremost, a “producer of happiness for all.”
For me, this aspiration evokes a memory from 34 years ago, when the budding MIT Solar-Electric Vehicle Team competed in the 1987 Swiss Tour de Sol.
In optimizing our car for greatest efficiency, we had inadvertently caused our transmission to slowly leak lubricating oil. The oil ran out and we broke down next to a farmer’s field with a seized gear — one of four. We removed the gear but to get moving again using the other 3 gears we needed a spacer to take the defective gear’s place.
The owner of the farm, who was watching the race, came over and asked if we needed help. We explained our predicament and he broke out in a big smile.
“I have something that will do the trick in my tool shed — wait here and I’ll go get it!”
While the farmer walked to his tool shed some distance away, we rummaged around in our spare parts bins and found that we actually had a suitable spacer as well.
“I’ll go run and tell him that we don’t need his part after all,” one of our younger team members offered.
“No — don’t do that,” our more experienced chief mechanical engineer replied. “That will make him feel that he wasted his time. He will feel better if we accept his help.”
Despite it costing us valuable race time, we waited for the farmer’s return to accept his spacer, put it in our transmission, and continued on our way. In the rearview mirror, we could see the farmer’s large smile and enthusiastic waves for our success.
That memory seared itself in my mind because of its paradoxical insight into what makes people happy.
Most economic rational choice theories reason that the way to maximize happiness is to receive as much value as possible while doing the minimum work possible.
By those theories, the farmer should not have expended effort to help us. Similarly, if the farmer was helping us, he would have been grateful had we chased after him to minimize his effort.
However, neither of those behaviors occurred. Instead, the farmer’s happiness increased by going out of his way to help us.
Why is that?
It is because human beings are social animals that derive happiness from both selfish and altruistic behavior. A late 19th century contemporary of Charles Darwin, Peter Kropotkin, pictured on the left, hypothesized that in addition to “survival of the fittest”, altruism also evolved because it too provided an advantage: a species whose individuals provided mutual aid was more likely to survive and reproduce than a species that did not.
It is not surprising then, that modern researchers like Elizabeth Dunn have found that people are happier spending resources on other people than on themselves, particularly if we see the impact of our giving. It’s what motivates charitable giving and volunteer activities like authoring Wikipedia pages and writing open-source software.
Our drive to give also resolves a uniquely human problem: our conscious realization of our limited individual significance.
We usually don’t think about it, but we are only a tiny spark in space and time — one of the billions of people living on one of the billions of planets in the Milky Way, which is one of the trillions of galaxies in the universe. And we live only a handful of years out of the billions of years that the universe has existed and will continue to exist. Even if we believe in the continuity of our souls after death, and that life on earth is unique, our time on earth is quite limited and we are still only one individual in a sea of billions.
So how do we find more meaning in our lives?
By giving to others.
Not only does it help other people, but it also makes us feel greater happiness, connection, and purpose.
With this understanding of human psychology, let’s return to the question of how can a mobility company hope to “produce happiness for all”?
One answer should be clear: By making products that do more than delight customers.
Products that delight customers may be a catchphrase in Silicon Valley and marketing departments, but to produce happiness for all we must go well beyond making products that simply delight.
We must make products that empower people to help one another in a multitude of ways.
Cars are one example of such products. The altruism enabled by a car can be as simple as giving a ride to someone in need, as dramatic as using a four-wheel-drive vehicle to tow someone else out of a snowbank, or as complex as choosing a low or zero emissions electrified vehicle to help preserve the environment we all share.
How does this translate to the future for Toyota? It does so in many ways. Today I’ll give an example from a non-automotive area: robotics.
Toyota has been working on robots for some time, particularly in the service of an aging society that could benefit from the assistance of such advanced machines.
Robotics researchers at Toyota Research Institute (TRI) spent some time in Japan before the COVID-19 pandemic interviewing elderly people and their families to better understand how this type of technology could support and even improve their lives.
What they discovered is that beyond the physical challenges of growing old, the greatest need of the elderly was to feel useful — to still have something real to give others.
What the aging people we interviewed wanted most was not a machine that would relieve them of household chores. What they desired was to sustain, or even reclaim, the purpose and independence that filled their lives when they were younger.
Since we can’t build a time machine, we are working to design robots that amplify people, rather than replace them, so they can continue to give of themselves.
For example, rather than designing a robot to cook meals, we are working to design a robot that enables an elderly person to cook meals as if they are 20 years younger, so that they can continue to experience the joy of cooking meals.
You can see some of our progress in this recent video from CNET:
As a final set of anecdotes, I’d like to relate something I’ve had the pleasure to learn during my work for Toyota about Asian culture, where social obligations and general consideration of other people’s welfare are very important.
As a first example, in Japanese culture, people pour drinks for one another (not for themselves) at meals.
And at company dinners, regardless of hierarchy, someone takes on the responsibility for ensuring that everyone is happy. It’s not always the boss, but often it is.
As a second example, when Akio Toyoda talks both about fully embracing new powertrains while also talking about his concern for the millions of jobs at parts suppliers that will be affected, these comments are not meant as an excuse to go slow. Rather, they come from the same cultural tradition as making sure someone else’s glass is never empty — caring deeply about the impact of our actions on others. It’s the same reason we try as hard as possible to avoid layoffs during business downturns — the obligation to care about other people first.
And the higher you go, the greater the obligation. As a final example, in some traditional Asian cultures where there is a strong hierarchy with grandparents at the top, the best food at a multigenerational meal is typically first given to the grandparents. The grandparents, however, will invariably move that food from their bowl and place it lovingly on the top of the grandchild’s rice bowl.
The best food may end up with the grandchildren, but the most joy belongs to the grandparents, for only they have the prerogative to bestow the greatest to the smallest.
Giving, and the happiness derived from it, is not only a perk of social position, but evidence of it.
The above examples are just some of the ways Toyota is striving towards the goal of “producing happiness for all”. And of course, we are not unique. Our desire is not only for Toyota to pursue this goal, but for evermore companies to help their customers and employees be truly happy — to go beyond making products that delight to making products that enable people to better help one another. It is what we believe is really needed to build a better world. I hope these examples inspire you to both produce happiness and feel the happiness of doing so, in your own way.
Best wishes!
Gill
