We tend to take things for granted in life, yet when managing a business we cannot allow our personal behaviors and attitudes to influence our managing decisions.

Firestone has had a ling history of misleading safety results and have not taken the time and effort to take this to an end.

If a company has a continuous error within its effectiveness, its internal or monetary value may be affected, but when talking about customers, human lives being affected. A complete different issue comes into effect: ethics.

“Because Firestone had previously been harmed by a high-visibility case involving safety issues with one of its products, you’d think that they’d have well-established risk management policies that would prepare them to be quick and upfront on something like this,” Dunfee says.

Anyone would think that after a major safety issue, a huge company like Firestone would never commit the same error again. But apparently they took their current policies at the time for granted and made the same mistake again, harming hundreds of civilians.

Until what point are companies responsible for the ethical outcomes that their products may inflict on customers? That line may be hard to define, but what there is no doubt about is that Firestone definitely crossed it.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=232