Thanks, probably, to the headline on the AP story covering Toyota president Akio Toyoda's press conference in Tokyo this morning --
"Toyota President Expresses Regret Over Fatal Crash" -- most of the coverage of the event
around the net and on news radio this morning focuses on his apology over the death of an American family that's apparently due to a faulty floor mat in a Lexus.
Toyoda actually
offered a "profusion of excuses,"
a New York Times headline declares, about everything from how
unprepared his company was for the global economic crisis to his standing on a podium that was higher than the reporters in the audience.
Business Week blogger Kenji Hall
puts a slightly different spin on it. He says that Toyoda, borrowing language from Jim Collins, author of
How the
Mighty Fall, is actually acknowledging that Toyota is actually at the fourth of five stages to death, and the fifth stage isn't pretty: "capitulation to irrelevance or death."
To wit, Toyoda says that Toyota is "grasping for salvation. But I'm not the savior." The only thing that will save the company is "to make better cars," he
asserts. As for his management philosophy, he says, it's simply "what is important to every customer."
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