Perhaps by now you've had your fill of the furious moralising and molten denunciations of Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants (or perhaps not – in which case, allow me to direct you to a little place on the internet called Twitter, where you will find so much more). But these reactions don't really help answer the big question of what actually went wrong at News International: how a successful Sunday newspaper apparently ended up as a cottage industry of phone hacking. A better guide to that lies in the story of the car that, in some cases, turned out to be a death-trap.

At the turn of the 70s, the top brass at Ford set out to come up with a car that weighed less than 2,000lbs and cost less than $2,000. Their answer turned out to be the Pinto, a sporty little thing with just one problem: in rear-end collisions, its gas tank had an unfortunate habit of exploding.

That fault would eventually make the Pinto one of the most notorious cars in history but, as Douglas Birsch and John Fielder recount in their book The Ford Pinto Case, no one at the time dared report it to the company's formidable CEO. "Hell, no," claimed one Ford engineer. "That person would have been fired." As the cigar-chomping boss Lee Iacocca was fond of declaring: "Safety doesn't sell."

Rather than repair the flaw, at the likely cost of about $11 a vehicle and a probable heap of damning publicity, executives reportedly decided it would be cheaper simply to pay off any lawsuits. But in time, 27 people died in Pinto fires, and by 1978 Ford had recalled 1.5m cars.

Anyone who has followed the News International fiasco will find plenty of resonances in this story – even down to the establishment of a legal hush fund. But think about the ingredients that went into the Pinto debacle. Fearsome management. A workforce who, it is claimed, understood that safety took lower priority. Among Ford's managers, lawyers, designers and engineers there may have been some rotten people. But for this completely avoidable disaster to have reached such huge dimensions, there had to be more: a blinkered corporate culture that apparently encouraged staff to behave unethically and to turn a blind eye to the tragic consequences.

Bear that point in mind today, as the Murdochs are hauled up in front of MPs, along with Rebekah Brooks and (separately) Sir Paul Stephenson. The parliamentarians will want to find out who did what when – and who else knew about it. And so they must. The media will pile in afterwards with their own deadline-driven morality tale about reprehensible Rupe and his automaton son James. And well they might. But if that's where the discussion stalls, then the bigger questions – about how this culture seemingly swept a newspaper, and how it might be avoided next time – will go unanswered.

One explanation for what happened at the News of the World can be found in a new book called Blind Spots. Its authors Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel look at how businesses, from Ford to Enron to subprime mortgage lenders, can end up mired in ethical disaster. But rather than discuss such choices as coolly calculated trade-offs between right and wrong, they look at how people actually make decisions – under pressure from shareholders, bosses and colleagues, up against tight deadlines and often worried about their careers, or even whether their contracts are going to be renewed.

The academics describe a process of "ethical fading" in businesses where maximising returns is encouraged over fairness to fellow employees and customers. The result is that right and wrong go out of the window. Read about the culture at the News of the World and "ethical fading" certainly comes to mind.

Management went in for "byline counts", weeding out reporters for filing too few splashy stories. "They were always seeking to get rid of people because it was a burn-out job," is how one correspondent puts it. The only way to guarantee your job was to come back with the sort of story the editor wanted.

That, you may say, has always been the rule in any newsroom. What seems to have changed at the News of the World, though, were two things: first, newspapers came under far greater commercial pressure as readers turned to the internet; and some employees discovered a cheap and easy technique for getting information – hacking into mobile phones.

Those two forces – greater market pressure and a novel way of doing business – have played a part in most of the big corporate ethical failures that I have seen in the past decade. Energy market liberalised and fancy accounting techniques? Enron. Low returns on investments and a new way of dishing out homeloans? Subprime. And now this. In most cases, many managers, shareholders and staff didn't necessarily set out to do bad things. They simply got swept along on a culture of hitting targets – and not asking too many questions.