Akio Toyoda, president of his grandfather’s company, Toyota Motor Corporation, begged forgiveness for its lapses in judgement wrt safety today.

This is the first step on the road to recovering the brand. He said that the safety of the product was his personal responsibility and talked about the internal processes Toyota is implementing to resolve the structural issues that led to those problems.

What the company needs to do now is win — and then tastefully publicize — several major safety awards, or barring that hire the most stringent safety reviewers in the world and get top marks from them.

Business communication crisis control: Apologize sincerely, fix the problems in an exemplary way, and then use the takeaways to innovate the heck out of your industry.

Time will tell if Toyota can pull a Tylenol here…

Their guiding philosophy, “The Toyota Way”, is a staple of operations management education and it’s kinda painful to me to see it blemished like this — I find it aesthetically pleasing and I hope it can recover. I suspect it will.