The question was recently posed, did Toyota abandon concern for safety or was safety never part of their culture?  With all due respect to the questioner, there are alternative explanations to “abandon safety” or “safety never part of their culture.”  It is entirely possible (more likely) that safety–both workplace and product–remains part of their culture [...]

Over the several weeks that stories about Toyota have unfolded, we’ve reflected that if Toyota, the most aggressive learner and the technological leader in the auto industry, was struggling with the complexity of its products, then who else with what else?
Two articles in the Wall Street Journal suggest this may go from a Toyota issue [...]

Here is one link to my interview last night following Akio Toyoda’s Congressional testimony.
Steve
MIT’s Spear Discusses Toyota’s Corporate Culture: Bloomberg TV Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Through this series of recalls and production and sales suspensions, my main thoughts are:

Toyota has succeeded in converting itself from a crummy auto maker in the 1950s to the world leader on quality, productivity, and technology on the basis of its capacity for improvement and innovation.
This capacity depends on a long standing, historical commitment to [...]

For decades, Toyota has been viewed as a paragon of corporate improvement, innovation and effectiveness, qualities that helped it become the world’s largest automaker. But the firm’s reputation has been sorely tested in recent weeks amid a string of well-publicized recalls involving millions of Toyota vehicles due to problems involving sticking accelerator pedals and brake [...]