American vs. Japanese

Toyota's head faced congress hearing the past week. Two quotes were widely used to show his attitude as well as his company: The first is "My name is on every car and you get my personal committment to fix this". The second is "I take full responsibility".

Recalling that he only took the job less than 2 years and now he said he toke full responsibility. That sounds a little strange as we usually hear this: the previous administration left us XXX of deficit and unemployment. Now we are turning around. It takes time. See the tone? We can see clearly how different in government versus private business. So letting the government run business isn't a good idea.

More implication is the way Americans handle these situation differ to the way Japanese is using. Although media in the US still grill Toyota on their wrongdoings, Japanese think Americans put Toyota in hold water pure out of politics to save their big Three. The sudden accelaration problem now trace back to 1997 model. That is more than 10 years ago. Toyota owners should have noticed that since that. Why dig it out?

Andy Grove, Intel's previous CEO, was smart enough to recall Intel's CEO promotly after they found the problem. Besides a tech savvy, he knew that competitors would be somewhere out there waiting for him if he had not done that.

A good lesson.