I understand your point about the general sloth of a huge organization, and I don't disagree. If I'm working for someone other than me, I prefer the atmosphere of smaller organizations to that of larger ones.
However, 'small and lean' in the automobile business is code for 'dead meat unless somebody much bigger helps us out somehow.' Why? Because small automobile companies don't have the free cash flow to run proper engineering departments. The SAAB example given illustrates this perfectly. SAAB's 'engineering focus' yielded cars that were literally a decade or more behind the competition in almost every respect.
If a 'small and lean' company does spend sufficiently in engineering, then their manufacturing (i.e. QC, tooling replacements, etc.) gets the shaft. That leads to a bad rep for poor quality that takes decades to overcome, if it can ever be overcome.
The primary reason Mazda sells so few vehicles today is because of (relatively) poor quality in the past. That perception, right or wrong, is still with them. That's also the main reason Mazda resale values are lower than the perceived 'high-quality' brands (in general; there may always be specific exceptions).
The same is true of Chrysler corporation, though they're a better long-term example. Chrysler was absolutely on top of the world in the mid to late 1950s, but a few things came together such that they had very poor build quality in about 1957-1959. They NEVER recovered from that.
We can agree to disagree, of course, but I am aware of no automobile company that exists today because of being 'small and lean,' unless it is a unit of a larger automobile company or it's a super-high-priced niche maker (even those are nearly all just brands of a bigger outfit like Fiat, etc.).
