Doubting Toyota Prince Defeats Crisis to Prove Self Wrong: Cars
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He’d heard it so often he began to believe it himself. Too young. Not up to the task. Didn’t deserve it. Only there because of his name.
“I probably won’t last a year as president, but at least I can finally do something for the company.” Akio Toyoda says those doubts haunted him in early 2010, eight months into the top job at the carmaker his father once ran and his grandfather founded. Eight months in which he’d been all but invisible as defects in autos bearing the family name were tied to deadly crashes in the U.S. And now he was headed for Washington to apologize to Congress and the American people.