“here should have been a recall years earlier that would have saved lives and been less damaging to the company.

an administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, summed up the situation precisely when she noted that

The size of the potential settlement was so high that lawyers feared the company would go out of business before it could [ay off all claims. Sue Bailey,

—Michelin and Goodyear. In December 2000, more than 180 individual legal suits against the company were consolidated into a single class action suit seeking in excess of $50 billion in damages.

The company’s 100-year relationship with Ford was damaged irreparably, and Ford announced that it was considering taking all of its future business to Firestone’s two primary competitors

that Firestone was forced to lay off hundreds of workers.

Ono was pressured into resigning, and the negative publicity damaged sales so badly (off 40 percent from the previous year)

In the end, the failure to perceive this problem and the delayed decision to recall the tires cost the organization dearly.

And although we knew we had an unusual amount of claims, we did not believe the statistics generated by these claims were a good indicator of tire performance.

“The tire industry’s traditional measures of product performance told us that these tires were fine.