Automotive Manufacturing Industry: Japanese vs American corporate cultures

With all the talk of bail-outs for American owned auto companies, I got 
to wondering about the foreign owned car production corps, and how 
they're being affected by all this.  Then I stumbled upon this article...

http://edgehopper.com/what-toyota-knows-that-gm-doesnt/

I think that this kind of corporate culture is the way of the future. 
Where employees are not simply viewed as an operating expense, but as 
assets of the company - as people, not commodities.... and when I say 
the future, I'm not restricting the concept to the automotive industry - 
I hope that this will be how all large companies are run one day.

The "note 2" at the bottom of the article also conjured a question I've 
often asked myself:  why are finance guys and marketers seemingly valued 
so highly compared to engineers and other technical positions?  It seems 
counter intuitive to consider the people who actually design and develop 
products as less valuable than those who simply hawk it to potential 
customers...  I mean, without the R&D department, the marketers and 
money jugglers would have nothing to work with.  On the other hand, the 
engineers and architects can happily do their work in the absence of the 
marketing and finance departments (they may not have a lot of money to 
work with due to lack of sales and such, but the point stands).  I see 
this situation as a symptom of the greater ailing of the American 
system... where money is valued over all else - products which provide 
actual value be damned.

I think the message in all this is clear: America's brand of capitalism 
has failed us all.  The values that drove it have been proven to be 
corrupt and untenable in the long term.  As a new paradigm emerges, we 
as participants in this global society need to make sure that it is not 
as easily gamed or corruptible as the current system is.