But, at that same “certain size”, shareholder value for your company becomes something influenced mostly by making your value-chain upstream/downstream partners happy, not by making the eventual customers of your product/service happy.
Rather than thinking about GM’s perspective, think about Takata’s perspective: they screwed up making an airbag, but everything was fine because they outsourced their audit to GM, so indeed it was “GM’s responsibility.” On top of that, GM is still happy to treat them as a partner.
Now imagine that instead of some random third-party supplier, Takata was a division of GM, selling to a different division of GM. The same considerations still apply from the Takata-as-division’s perspective, even though nominally they’re part of a company of that “certain scale.”
Rather than thinking about GM’s perspective, think about Takata’s perspective: they screwed up making an airbag, but everything was fine because they outsourced their audit to GM, so indeed it was “GM’s responsibility.” On top of that, GM is still happy to treat them as a partner.
Now imagine that instead of some random third-party supplier, Takata was a division of GM, selling to a different division of GM. The same considerations still apply from the Takata-as-division’s perspective, even though nominally they’re part of a company of that “certain scale.”