FORTUNE — When the final tally was made for 2011, Toyota Motor (TM), formerly the world’s largest automaker, slipped to third place in production behind General Motors (GM) and Volkswagen. It’s not surprising: Toyota has endured a string of calamities over the past three years — natural and man-made — that would make even the company’s famous paranoia seem like sunny optimism. The latest is endaka, the strong yen that causes everything that Toyota manufactures in Japan to be more expensive and undermines its profitability. A November issue of Automotive News predicted “more misery” for Toyota as “sales slip, floods delay, shoppers stray.”
At the head of the company all this time has been a young president who was effectively born into the job and has little experience in crisis management: Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company’s founder. For a decade, while the automaker was being run by professional managers, Akio rose up the corporate ladder without making much of a mark. (For the sake of clarity, we’ll use his first name, pronounced a-KEY-o, in this story.) Thrust into the presidency in 2009, he immediately had to cope with a global recession, massive recalls, and a deadly tsunami. Auto production plummeted, and at the same time Toyota lost its most important competitive advantage: its reputation for exceptional quality. Americans saw Akio apologizing before Congress and later tearing up in a YouTube video. U.S. market share tumbled. After reaching 18.3% at the end in 2009, it fell all the way to 12.9% for 2011. Emboldened by the recall crisis, competitors spread word that Toyota, once considered the unstoppable force of the automotive world, had been reduced to the status of also-ran.
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