Some played football, basketball or golf in their formative years. Gary Toyama tackled the more humble sport of bowling.
Toyama, recently named as vice president overseeing Boeing Corp.’s local operations, was serious about the pins. He said he needed just one lesson to get good. At age 13, he said his average score was 170. By 18, he had the credentials to go pro.
During his life, Toyama has bowled 27 perfect games.
But the affable Toyama prefers to talk about the technical side of bowling equipment, different throwing styles and how all the details come together to make a strike.
“Bowling is one of those sports where technique and the mind come in as well,” Toyama said. “So decisions have to be made to help balance out the lack of physical ability.”
Life After Bowling
Toyama gave up professional bowling after college. These days, his attention to detail and fascination with how things work are playing out at Boeing.
He oversees the Chicago-based company’s sprawling Integrated Defense Systems operations in Southern California. The operations span seven cities and 32,000 workers, including around 12,000 in Orange County.
Toyama said he wants to be more focused on improving operations.
Bill Collopy, Toyama’s predecessor since 2003, retired in October. Toyama reports to James Albaugh, Boeing’s former top executive in OC and head of Integrated Defense Systems.
The goal: boost links among Boeing’s various programs, Toyama said. Unneeded facilities could be sold off, he said.
“I thought there was a lot that could and still needed to be done,” said Toyama, who works from Boeing’s regional headquarters in Seal Beach and lives in Orange.
A colleague of Toyama’s said he manages like he bowls,systematically.
“He talks about the details but also steps back and talks to you about the big picture,” said John Tracy, vice president of engineering for Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems. “Everything he does is supported by facts and data.”
Toyama doesn’t have direct responsibility for Boeing’s military programs in the area. But he oversees their implementation on a daily basis. His job is to make sure Boeing’s many businesses vying for contracts around the world have the best facilities and access to people.
Public Face
He also is the public face of Boeing in the region, where the company is one of the largest employers. Boeing is second only to Walt Disney Co. as a private employer in OC.
Toyama said he can devote more time to the job than Collopy, who still serves as chairman of Long Beach-based Sea Launch Co., a Boeing satellite venture with European partners.
“There were a lot of demands on him,” Toyama said of Collopy. “I have less things on my plate.”
Collopy also was involved in acquisitions for Boeing.
The challenge for Toyama is in tying together a handful of acquisitions, which created one of the most diverse collections of businesses for Boeing anywhere.
“Things were not coordinated to the degree I thought they would be,” he said.
Operations range from 50-year-old submarine technology programs in Anaheim to the latest in networked operations for the military in Huntington Beach.
And the programs often are in flux. Huntington Beach’s Delta rocket group is set to move to the Denver area in about a year as part of a planned satellite combination with Lockheed Martin Corp.,if the venture passes regulatory scrutiny.
Boeing’s big buy came at the end of 1996 when the company acquired the defense and space units of what’s now Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation Inc.
A year or so later, Boeing bought St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas Corp., creating the largest aerospace company. McDonnell Douglas also had extensive operations in Southern California.
Then in 2000, Boeing bought Hughes Electronics Corp.’s space and communications businesses in El Segundo in a deal led by Collopy.
The businesses operated on their own until Boeing created Integrated Defense Systems, which oversees all military and space contracts from St. Louis.
“We had to start all over again,” Toyama said.
The local operations are a cross-section of the acquisitions.
“Southern California tends to be the melting pot of all of them,” he said.
Integration was slowed amid the wave of big deals, Toyama said. Buys on that scale can take years to fully complete, he said.
The lack of unification has meant sites sometimes make decisions without much thought to how they can affect other operations, Toyama said.
If a program is shutting down in Anaheim, executives there should notify other sites to help find jobs for workers, he said.
Toyama isn’t just being nice. Doing so helps Boeing keep workers in the highly competitive market for aerospace engineers.
Managers from various sites now get together with more meetings planned, Toyama said.
He said he’s also trying to organize information from each site so it can be shared among different operations.
Another legacy of the acquisitions: extra space.
The company’s real estate arm, Irvine-based Boeing Realty Corp., already has sold off acres of land in Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and elsewhere for redevelopment.
Taking Inventory
Toyama said he is using his attention to detail to see what buildings may need to be sold off,and if some programs should be moved.
He declined to say where cutbacks could fall.
This is a lonely but key job for Toyama. No one will volunteer to give up any space, he said, and any decision stands to be unpopular with some.
“No site would ever close itself,” he said.
Toyama has worked at several of the company’s sites throughout Southern California in the past 30 years.
“I knew all the players,” he said. “I knew the history and the background of all the cultures. Those kinds of things, I think, help me to figure out how we can move forward.”
Toyama began his career in the 1970s at Rockwell’s Newport Beach site in the finance department after earning an undergraduate degree in engineering and a master’s of business administration from the University of California, Irvine.
Within three years, he was in management and later moved on to operations and manufacturing at Rockwell.
Since the late 1990s, he’s touched almost every piece of the region’s businesses.
Toyama has been the business director for the Delta IV rocket program in Huntington Beach. He also was director of business operations for the space and communication group in Seal Beach.
When Integrated Defense Systems was formed in 2002, he worked on the creation of the group.
Most recently, Toyama was deputy to the vice president of Integrated Defense Systems, John Van Gels. The two oversaw 20,000 workers in 20 plants across the country.
Family Background
Toyama came from humble beginnings.
His parents are Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II. His mother was a homemaker. His dad was a low-level manager at a pipe fittings warehouse. Both are retired in Long Beach.
Forget the cliche about hard-driving Asian parents. Toyama said his parents didn’t put undue pressure on him and let him make his own decisions.
They did introduce him to bowling. And Toyama said he’s thankful for that.
While college friends always were broke, Toyama said he had loads of money from weekend tournaments.
“I always had cash in my pocket,” he said.
