I just find its
invocation to be weird.
With so much at stake, why didn’t GM act sooner?
The answer, according to many people familiar with the automaker, is a corporate culture reluctant to pass along bad news. When GM was struggling to cut costs and buff its image, a recall of its popular small cars would have been a terrible setback. By the time GM engineers began to face up to the potential gravity of the defect, the Great Recession had hit and the company was begging Congress for a taxpayer bailout that would become its financial lifeline.
