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Last week, we learned that not long before the massive Toyota recalls began, a top executive told the company, “The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean.” Toyota clearly knew about its problems with unintended acceleration several months before it said or did anything to protect its customers.

Now, it seems that Toyota has another major problem: it’s terribly organized. In the words of CNN, its “anachronistic management structure…has proved inefficient and counterproductive, and could be potentially ruinous.”

Toyota is basically organized the same way it was half-a-century ago when it first began selling cars in the U.S. None of its operations are functionally integrated — and all report back to Japan. It is a caricature of a chimneyed company with vertical structures and no coordination.

It is an organizational scheme more befitting of a tiny manufacturer from a developing country than a global behemoth with aspirations to dominate the industry. –CNN

When viewed in the context of Toyota’s demonstrated deceitfulness, this new discovery about the company’s management structure makes Toyota’s future look all the more unstable—and the company itself that much harder to trust.

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