Jim Press, President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc.

Even the most hardened GM lifer will admit it's now only a question of time, and Bill Ford has already waved the white flag: Toyota will be the world's number-one automaker. The mechanics of Toyota's inexorable rise to the top are well understood in corporate America: The highly efficient Toyota Production System was based in part on the work of Iowa-born statistician W. Edwards Deming; and the brilliant analysis on the differences among American, European, and Japanese auto manufacturing, "The Machine That Changed the World," written by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos, has been in the nation's bookshops since 1990. But the real reason for Toyota's success runs deeper than mere mechanics. Just ask the man who probably knows more about what makes this company tick than any other American: Jim Press.

James E. Press is now in his 36th year as a Toyota employee. He's president and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc. and a member of the company's board of directors, the first non-Japanese in Toyota's history to hold these positions. He spends as much of his time at Toyota's global HQ in Nagoya, Japan, as he does at the company's U.S. base in Torrance, California, and unwinds from the long hours of air travel by pounding up and down a swimming pool most mornings and competing in grueling triathlons when he can. Press began his automotive career with Ford in the late 1960s. But he's left the traditional Detroit mindset a long way behind.

"We're on a mission for a higher purpose." Avuncular and softly spoken, Press leans forward as he speaks, sounding more like a cross between an old-school family physician and a folksy small-town pastor on the church steps after a Sunday service than the man running the American operation of the world's most relentlessly successful auto business. When asked to explain what he means, he launches into a brief homily: "You go to a construction site, and there are three guys running jackhammers," he says. "You ask the first guy what he's doing and he says: 'What does it look like I'm doing? I'm digging a hole in the cement. Get outta the way.' You ask the second guy and he says: 'I'm putting food on the table for my family. I've gotta have a job, you know.' You ask the third guy and he says: 'I'm building a temple for God.' If you can move your organization to that level, you can accomplish things beyond what you might think."

This sure ain't the sort of stuff they teach in MBA courses. But the more you talk with Jim Press, the more you understand just how radically different Toyota's view of the automotive business world is from that of a Detroit still populated by managers and unions that grew up in an industry riding on easy street, a Detroit now hostage to the sharp-suited money men on Wall St. who see building cars and trucks as nothing more than an inefficient use of capital.