丁晓忠外刊第一次课讲义.docVIP

There’s a very simple reason why no carmaker can seem to rule the industry for long By Steve LeVine??Jason Karaian? September 22, 2015 First it was GM, then Toyota, and now Volkswagen: For each of these players in a seemingly star-crossed game, no sooner did it rise to be the biggest name in carmaking, than it fell in a stupendous, unforced blunder. Experts say that there in fact is a Pyrrhic quality to victory in the carmaking majors—it’s nice to reach the top, but to get there, you end up cutting corners. “There is an industry cocktail that breeds this behavior,” Nick Oliver, a professor at the University of Edinburgh Business School, told Quartz. Oliver, co-author (with Matthias Holweg) of the forthcoming bookCrisis, Resilience and Survival: Lessons from the Global Auto Industry, said, “The car industry is characterized by huge, economically marginal companies. There’s a kind of pressure cooker that breeds funny behavior.” GM was the world’s biggest-selling carmaker for 77 consecutive years until 2008, a colossal so central to American power that the arc of the two—the company and the country—seemed intertwined. But with those heights came hubris. Starting in the 1970s, GM—along with its US competitors Ford and Chrysler—became known for stodgy, lackluster design and, later, mediocre quality. The scale of GM’s carelessness reached an apex in 2010, when it suffered the ignominy of bankruptcy, and was derided by some as Government Motors. Yet even that embarrassment failed to force GM to entirely regroup. Last week (Sept. 17) the company?agreed to pay?a $900 million fine for deliberately concealing a faulty ignition switch responsible for the deaths of some 120 people. Meanwhile, Japanese carmakers, once a joke in the US, surged into the market with vehicles admired for consistent quality and innovation. At the front of the pack was Toyota, with its market-leading Camry. Toyota came on strong—before anyone, the company produced a mass-market hybrid elec