Toyoda 'deeply sorry' for safety flaws

Akio Toyoda, the mysterious scion of the Toyota empire, apologized yesterday before a House committee investigating deadly flaws that sparked the recall of 8.5 million cars.

Toyoda, the automaker's chief executive, accepted "full responsibility" for the halting steps that led to the recall. He said the company grew too fast to keep up with safety controls.

"We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization," Toyoda said in testimony prepared for delivery after press time last night (Beijing time).

"I regret that this has resulted in the safety issues described in the recalls we face today, and I am deeply sorry for any accidents that Toyota drivers have experienced."

Toyoda's statement departs somewhat from Japanese formality. In it, Toyoda made a personal appeal for credibility. He offered his condolences over the deaths of four San Diego, California, family members in a crash of their Toyota in late August.

"I will do everything in my power to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again," Toyoda was due to tell the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "My name is on every car. You have my personal commitment that Toyota will work vigorously and unceasingly to restore the trust of our customers."

But an apology won't be enough for the feisty panel of lawmakers on the House panel in a year in which every one faces re-election. Nor will any culture gap; Japanese CEOs typically serve symbolic roles akin to figureheads without much power to control operations.

Toyoda at first declined to appear before the panel but acquiesced last week when he was officially invited.

"I'm naive enough to believe that a global CEO is a global CEO," said Democratic Representative Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, a member of the committee. "He's going to have to say more than that."

In Japan, company chiefs are usually picked to cheerlead the rank and file. As the grandson of the company's founder, Toyoda was groomed to play that role.

The firm was called "Toyota" because its eight strokes were considered luckier than the 10 for "Toyoda".

Japanese corporate royalty or no, Toyoda is familiar with the United States and its corporate culture.

He received his MBA in 1982 at Babson College in Massachusetts. He spent time in California as vice-president of a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corp and General Motors Corp.

Source: China Daily

Does Italy’s Google Conviction Portend More Censorship?

Online rights activists are divided Wednesday over an Italian court’s guilty verdicts against Google executives who were convicted on privacy charges for not blocking a video that made fun of a child with Down syndrome. All agree the controversial ruling runs counter to longstanding U.S. and E.U. “safe harbor” laws immunizing online service providers for what users do — but the activists are mixed over what the decision means and how much importance should be place on it.

Leslie Harris, the president of the influential Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology, argued the ruling would be used by authoritarian regimes to justify their own web censorship.

“Today’s stunning verdict sets an extremely dangerous precedent that threatens free expression and chills innovation on the global internet,” Harris said in an e-mail statement. “If the conviction is allowed to stand, it will chill the provision of Web 2.0 services that provide user-generated content platforms in Italy, and Italian internet users will find themselves without a powerful forum for free expression.

“Most troubling, what happened in Italy is unlikely to stay in Italy. The Italian court’s actions today will surely embolden authoritarian regimes and be used to justify their own efforts to suppress internet freedom.”
Chief among the concerns is that nations might turn to using criminal laws or threats of criminal prosecutions to force companies to bend to the their political will.

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation shares Harris’ concern for online rights.

“The threat to internet free speech from nations around the world that don’t have the same laws and attitudes about free speech is absolutely a constant problem and is getting worse,” Tien said.

But he warned against placing too much emphasis on this case, which many see as thinly veiled machinations against Google by Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has nearly monopoly control over Italy’s mainstream media. Italy’s parliament is currently considering a law that would put online video services under the same rules imposed on broadcast stations — legislation intended to stifle online speech.

But the Google case will drag on in appeals for years and it’s not clear it will be anything more than a legal anomaly.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of real and sticky issues around hate speech and pornography — where people have legitimate issues and real public policy has to be worked out, according to Tien.

“I’d prefer people to think about those cases and not focus on show cases,” he said.

Google, for one, called the decision “astonishing.”

“It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the internet is built,” Google lawyer Matt Sucherman wrote on Google’s blog. “If that ’safe harbor’ principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

And while it might be tempting for some to dismiss the suit as the work of a crazy Italian justice system, the United States is no stranger to politically motivated legal attacks on free speech and internet freedom.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles prosecuted and convicted a Missouri woman on hacking charges for helping put up a fake MySpace profile to harass a neighbor’s teenage daughter, who later committed suicide. The judge in the case overturned Lori Drew’s conviction. He found the government’s contention that violating a website’s terms of service was the same as hacking “unconstitutional.”

And in South Carolina, the Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened to criminally prosecute Craigslist management if the classified listings site didn’t remove its erotic listings category, saying the site was promoting prostitution. A federal judge had to order McMaster to stop his threats.

The Italy decision won’t be published in full for several weeks and will likely be on appeal for years. None of those convicted will likely ever serve their six months of jail time, in no small part since they all live outside of Italy. The video at issue appeared in 2006, on Google Video, a service now replaced by YouTube.

University of Virgina media studies and law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, meanwhile, sees the Italian case as a very local issue rooted in Italian politics and a sign that Google’s culture of audacious enterprises isn’t as welcome outside the Unite States as it hoped it would be.

“The government in Italy wants to hold Google down in Italy until it says ‘uncle’ for a while,” Vaidhyanathan said. “But it does say a lot about the fact that the globalization of Google is not going well. The ruling comes as cyberliberties are in flux globally and Google is trying to maintain revenues in countries like Egypt and Russia.”

Vaidhyanathan, whose upcoming book The Googlization of Everything tackles the subject of Google as a worldwide cultural force, says that the net’s and Google’s method of doing things first and letting people opt out later is proving to be not a hit everywhere around the globe.

“Google is finding that getting beyond America is difficult,” sad Vaidhyanathan, referring to Google’s hacking showdown in China, privacy issues with its Street View mapping cameras in Germany, and the censorship demands placed on it by China, Turkey, Thailand, Argentina and India.

“I can see the general objection to Google’s way of doing things,” said Vaidhyanathan. “It’s default setting is that it can do whatever it wants and if you have a problem, just let them know, and that opt-out model is not applicable in every case.”

To others, like Tien, the ruling is simply baffling. Clearly, Italy doesn’t want its own service providers to have to meet the burden of approving every forum posting, blog comment or uploaded video — and punishing executives when their companies miss the mark — as was the case of the Google executives in Italy.

That’s akin to making automobile executives personally liable in any automobile accident related to the company’s sticky pedal woes.

Tien said that would be a “massive extension of liability.”

Source: http://newscri.be/link/1027541

Global Crisis Leads I.M.F. Experts to Rethink Long-Held Ideas

WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund has long preached the virtues of keeping inflation low and allowing money to flow freely across international boundaries. But two recent research papers by economists at the fund have questioned the soundness of that advice, arguing that slightly higher inflation and restrictions on capital flows can sometimes help buffer countries from financial turmoil.

One paper has received particular attention for suggesting that central banks should set their target inflation rate much higher — at 4 percent, rather than the 2 percent that is the most widely held standard. As aggregate demand fell across the world in 2008, central banks, including the Federal Reserve, lowered short-term interest rates to nearly zero, where they have largely remained.

While the two papers do not represent a formal shift in the fund’s positions, they suggest that the I.M.F. is re-examining some of its long-established orthodoxies as part of its response to the global economic crisis that began in 2007.

The significant drop in the volatility of output and inflation since the mid-1980s — a period known as the Great Moderation — helped lull “macroeconomists and policy makers alike in the belief that we knew how to conduct macroeconomic policy,” the fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, wrote in one of the papers. “The crisis clearly forces us to question that assessment.”

That paper examines how, in hindsight, higher rates would have helped in the current crisis.

“Higher average inflation, and thus higher nominal interest rates to start with, would have made it possible to cut interest rates more, thereby probably reducing the drop in output and the deterioration of fiscal positions,” Mr. Blanchard and two other authors wrote in the paper, released Feb. 12.

The other paper, released Friday, said that in the aftermath of the crisis, officials were “reconsidering the view that unfettered capital flows are a fundamentally benign phenomenon.”

“Concerns that foreign investors may be subject to herd behavior, and suffer from excessive optimism, have grown stronger; and even when flows are fundamentally sound, it is recognized that they may contribute to collateral damage, including bubbles and asset booms and busts,” the fund’s deputy director of research, Jonathan D. Ostry, wrote, along with five other authors.

Both papers contained important caveats.

Mr. Blanchard’s said that fiscal policy — like decisions to tax, spend and borrow — had been as important in responding to the crisis as monetary policy, or control of the supply of credit. It argued that governments that had relatively lower debts to begin with had more flexibility to respond to the crisis.

And it asserted that regulatory measures — like requiring higher capital and liquidity ratios, lower loan-to-value ratios for home mortgages, and increased margin requirements for stock purchases — would be more effective than higher inflation targets in curbing excessive risk-taking.

Similarly, Mr. Ostry’s report said capital controls would be effective only if the flows “are likely to be transitory” and the economy is already operating near potential, with reserves at an adequate level and an exchange rate that is not undervalued.

The report also found that “the jury is still out” on whether capital controls had worked in practice. Evidence from countries like Chile and Colombia, it said, suggests that controls have been more effective at curbing exchange-rate pressures and the risk associated with capital inflows than in reducing the net influx of money.

In separate interviews, three former I.M.F. chief economists said the recommendations were significant but raised questions about the feasibility of carrying them out in today’s situation.

Raghuram G. Rajan, of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, said the I.M.F.’s suggestion for allowing higher inflation might not be well received. “With bond markets worried that governments may inflate their way out of their debt obligations, this is probably not a good time for central banks to start debating their inflation targets,” he said.

Mr. Rajan said he was concerned that the nuances regarding capital controls would be overlooked. “The pressure within emerging markets to set up capital controls, with many countries not meeting the careful conditions laid out by the fund’s paper, will increase,” he predicted.

Kenneth S. Rogoff of Harvard noted that he had urged that the Fed and the European Central Bank consider slightly higher inflation targets after the 2001 recession in the United States. But he added, “Having spent the past two decades convincing the public that 2 percent inflation was magical, it might be both difficult and confusing for central banks to suddenly announce they have changed their minds.”

He said Mr. Ostry’s report was only the latest step in the fund’s reassessment of its “dogma on capital controls” that began with the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. “Today, it is patently obvious that the U.S. and Europe’s near-zero-policy interest rates are fueling a surge of international capital into Asia and Latin America that will end in tears if not properly managed.”

Simon Johnson, of the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., said it would be “a very hard sell” to persuade central banks to raise their inflation targets “just because the financial sector is badly run and hard to reform.”
But he praised the emphasis on regulation. “The I.M.F. is trying to redefine what is and what is not responsible financial policy after the crisis,” he said. “They are commendably aware of the need for greater regulation and the ways to synchronize that around the world.”

By SEWELL CHAN

Published: February 21, 2010

What can we do to help Malaysia?

THE most difficult part of solving problems is not coming out with solutions; it is recognising and then identifying the problem.

Acknowledging there is a problem is always tough, especially if one is part of the problem; denial is a common human trait.

Even more challenging is the unwillingness to speaking out openly, even if one knows the real problems. Often, it is easier to point a finger at others – so the “blame game” ensues but naturally the real problem gets bigger.

That line of thought crossed my mind during the recent 1Malaysia Economic Conference organised by the Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry Malaysia.

Many prominent speakers spoke openly during the conference, acknowledging and identifying many of the problems Malaysia face today. Some of the challenges I’d like to give prominence are:

·Middle-income trap: According to a World Bank survey, Malaysia has been a middle-income economy for over three decades whereas Hong Kong and Singapore have vaulted into high-income economies since the 1990s.

We are trapped in a low-cost, low-value economic structure; persistent low wages too are not attracting and retaining domestic and foreign talents, making it more difficult to move up the value chain.

·Malaysia’s education system: Substantial investment in education has not led to improvement in quality.

For example, Malaysia spends an average 5.9% of gross domestic product (GDP) annually on public education, substantially higher than Japan (3.9%), South Korea (3.9%) or Singapore (3.5%).

And yet, according to a Trends in International Mathematics and Sciences Score 2003-2007 survey, our secondary students’ maths scores had deteriorated (from 508 to 474 points) while Japan, South Korea and Singapore were able to maintain or improve on their performance (ranging from 570 to 605 points).

Unfortunately, our human capital is now lagging in global competitive skills where we used to excel, such as in language, math and general knowledge.

·Bad habits: We are too dependent on cheap foreign labour (19% of employment in 2008 compared with 9% in 2000), subsidies (over RM20bil annually to maintain price controls), oil as major source of revenue (about 40% of Government revenue in 2009) and energy. Can we wean ourselves of these addictions for a better future?

The Prime Minister, in his opening address, said if Malaysians do not recognise that time for change has come, we will be left behind.

He spoke about social capital, recreating a cohesive society and “no one should be marginalised” in a 1Malaysia society.

Tun Musa Hitam (former deputy prime minister) and Datuk Nicholas Zeffreys (president of American Malaysian Chamber of Commerce) pointed out that the rakyat are part of the problem because the present state of our nation is what we collectively did or failed to do over the years.

For instance, if we detest corruption, we should discourage it strongly. If we find there are fewer business opportunities in Malaysia, then compete around the world; if we find our politicians not up to standard, then exercise our votes diligently.

So, instead of assigning blame, we should be asking – what can we do to help our nation move to a progressive society and an economically vibrant country for our children?

There are many ways the rakyat can contribute. For a start, ponder on the few points below:

·Understand the real problem: First, stop the blame game and excuses; get on with how and what we, the rakyat, can do to contribute to a better civil society.

·Continuous improvements: All of us should think about improving ourselves, whether it is in technical education and training, moral and ethical education or the arts and so forth.

In commerce, we should all work harder to increase Malaysia’s efficiency and productivity and be globally competitive.

·Speak out: Do so peacefully, so that politicians and government officials recognise and hear the voices of the rakyat; and not the 10% or less of rent-seeking people with self interests, who are speaking louder than anyone else.

·Vote: Exercise your voting rights – there are an estimated five million unregistered voters today. If you do not exercise your rights to vote, we have lost your say on how to build a better society.

·Work with your fellow Malaysian of all races: Similarly, we should welcome talented people from all over the world regardless of race to work here. Living in a globalised world, we cannot afford to be narrow-minded and think along racial lines.

I am sure the vast majority of intelligent and sensible rakyat are more than willing to contribute and work hard for a progressive and civil Malaysia.


By Teoh Kok Pin ·The writer is the founder and chief investment officer of Singular Asset Management Sdn Bhd.

Business Culture Steers Flow of Ideas, Study Says

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2010) — The business culture that companies emphasize has an effect on new product ideas that bubble back up from the workforce, a University of Illinois marketing study found.

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Groundbreaking ideas spring most from companies that stress technology, rather than customer needs or staying ahead of competitors, according to research that will appear in the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Firms that focus on their competitors or customers generate more new product suggestions than technology-based companies, the study found. But the ideas typically net only subtle advances, such as the slow evolution of wireless reading devices, rather than breakthroughs similar to the shift from compact discs to music downloads.

"Customer- and competitor-oriented companies are more likely to come up with variations of existing products because they watch their markets closely and react to demands rather than building on breakthrough technology," said William Qualls, a U. of I. marketing professor who co-wrote the study.

He says the findings suggest that firms are best served by a balanced philosophy that includes all three cultures. While an emphasis on technology bolsters innovation, he said, market-driven firms are more attuned to what consumers want, giving them an edge in commercializing new products.

History is littered with technological leaps that sputtered for lack of effective marketing, said Qualls, who co-wrote the study with Jelena Spanjol, then a U. of I. doctoral student and now a marketing professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Jose Antonio Rosa, a former U. of I. marketing professor who is now at the University of Wyoming.

AT&T developed its Picturephone in the 1960s, but not a market for it, Qualls said. Motorola is behind many advances in cell-phone technology, but failed to become an industry leader because the company focused on innovation at the expense of marketing.

"If innovation and marketing don't get equal attention, good ideas might never reach the marketplace or firms could sink millions of dollars into innovations that will ultimately have no appeal to consumers," he said.
The study is unique because past research has focused largely on the link between business culture and the success of launched products, rather than probing the idea stage, said Qualls, the interim head of the department of business administration.

Findings are based on an analysis of survey responses from nearly 200 marketing and research managers who work for companies that make household and personal products, from appliances to skin cream.
"Without good ideas, you can't come up with innovative new products," Qualls said. "Firms need to know how to generate as many new ideas as possible, and how to screen them so they have the best chance for success."

He says the findings lend support for a budding business theory known as open innovation, which encourages firms to use external as well as internal input to develop and launch new products.

Companies that lack resources to generate more ideas by instilling new technology or market-based cultures can instead partner with outside organizations, universities or even solicit suggestions from consumers, Qualls said.

Intel Corp. and Proctor & Gamble Co. are among firms that have bolstered product development through outside alliances, he said. Others are pulling consumers into the mix, including Netflix, which offered $1 million to anyone who comes up with a better system for delivering movies.

"The whole idea of open innovation is that firms need to be able to absorb knowledge from any source, and not just rely on the knowledge it has internally," Qualls said. "And the more ideas they get, the better the chance that one will click."

He says the study shows firms that fail to broaden their cultures or seek outside input will lag behind companies that do.

"It's not impossible, but companies are tying their hands behind their backs if they don't change," Qualls said. "Innovation can happen by accident. Post-It Notes and Velcro were accidents. But you can't run a company hoping for potentially successful accidents."