Fourteen years ago today, in the midst of damaging news reports about safety problems due to unintended acceleration, the chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation testified before the House of Representatives. His testimony is a masterclass in leading during a crisis. Watch Akio Toyoda's testimony on YouTube (it's less than 15 minutes long).

Some Key Points

1. Product quality is ultimately the leader's job, and it must rest on a philosophy of . At Toyota, key tenets of that philosophy are transparency and . Those should be part of every company's philosophy.

"I myself, as well as Toyota, am not perfect. At times, we do find defects. But in such situations, we always stop, strive to understand the problem, and make changes to improve further."

2. Keep your priorities straight. Your ability to maintain quality should be as much of a constraint on growth as your operating cash cycle.

"I would like to point out here that Toyota's priority has traditionally been the following: First; Safety, Second; Quality, and Third; Volume. These priorities became confused, and we were not able to stop, think, and make improvements as much as we were able to before, and our basic stance to listen to customers' voices to make better products has weakened somewhat."

3. A promise to improve without a system that drives improvement is an empty promise.

"I would like to reaffirm our values of placing safety and quality the highest on our list of priorities, which we have held to firmly from the time we were founded. I will also strive to devise a system in which we can surely execute what we value."

4. The leader is responsible for first hand understanding of the customer experience.

"I myself am a trained test driver. As a professional, I am able to check on problems in a car, and can understand how severe the safety concern is in a car. I drove the vehicles in the accelerator pedal recall as well as the Prius, comparing the vehicles before and after the remedy in various environmental settings. I believe that only by examining the problems on-site, can one make decisions from the customer perspective. One cannot rely on reports or data in a meeting room."

Mr. Toyoda did not shy away from criticism or hard decisions. Here's the kicker. When the investigations were concluded (five years later), all but one of the cases were concluded to be driver error. The crisis was caused by grandstanding on the part of the government and the press. It would have been easy to get defensive in the face of unjust persecution, but Toyota stayed focused on core principles. In doing so, the company maintained and enhanced its customers' trust.In February of 2014, a share of TM traded at about $77 per share. Today it trades at $235 per share. In that time, each share has paid out $37.62 in dividends. Not bad for a giant company in a mature industry. Especially compared to Ford (down ~25% over the period) and GM (basically flat).