Toyota: what comes after hubris?

As I forecast on this blog a couple of weeks ago, Toyota is indeed being given an almost ritualised pummelling in the USA.
Right now, it seems that anyone who has ever had an accident in a Toyota over the past 10 years now thinks there's a possibility it was caused by a strange mechanical problem which only afflicted a certain Japanese make.
You can picture the scene in small-town USA: "Hey, Hank, remember when you bumped the fender down at the mall in '97? Well, this nice lawyer from 0800-Sue-the-Bums reckons it wasn't cos of your reading glasses but because the Corolla had gotten an al qaeda under the hood!"
Think about it: the likelihood that millions of Toyotas have been driving round with deathly faults for decades is probably up there with an asteroid smash on the probability scale.
That doesn't change the fact that one of the world's biggest, most prominent companies has been exposed as a booby.
Akio Toyoda, the company's current boss and a member of the founding family, knows what part of the problem is.
Indeed, in what will now sound like a eery forecast of its troubles, he warned the business months before this problem blew up that it was on the verge of hubris – it had got so big it thought it could do no wrong.
Whether the recall nightmare will turn out to be nemesis – the ruin of the mighty - remains to be seen.
Right now, the company has to get on top of its crisis in the USA, where it faces claims it has covered up its problems for months.
Business experts believe that the solution lies not in the USA but in Japan, where some key facets of Japanese corporate culture may have conspired to aggravate Toyota's problems.
Few big Japanese companies ever have outsiders right at the top. They are almost always run by middle-aged Japanese suits. So even though Japan is a massive exporter of goods to foreign countries there are very few foreigners influencing strategy in the boardroom.
And failure is a dirty word. If problems crop up, it's not uncommon for them to be concealed from company leaders because of the risk of loss of face.
You can see that this is a potentially toxic mix.
For Toyota, the question is whether it can really admit to its own internal failings. Yes, it will have to fess up in front of frothing US politicians. But beyond the brakes recall, it may also need to take its own corporate culture right back to the drawing board.