Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [2]
As an industrial power, the United States has a historic window. Exchange rates are in our favor, labor rates are, by most standards, competitive. We still have ingenuity, initiative, and a deep well of technological innovation.
It’s time to stop the dominance of the number crunchers, living in their perfect, predictable, financially projected world (who fail, time and again), and give the reins to the “product guys” (of either gender), those with vision and passion for the customers and their product or service.
It applies in any business. Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys, and supermarkets by supermarket guys. With the advice and support of their bean counters, absolutely, but with the final word going to those who live and breathe the customer experience. Passion and drive for excellence will win over the computer-like, dispassionate, analysis-driven philosophy every time.
1
The Beginning
A CHAUFFEUR-DRIVEN CADILLAC GLIDED SILENTLY TO THE CURB IN front of the Ann Arbor office of Exide Technologies, the world’s largest producer of lead-acid batteries. I was CEO and had a good view of the front from my office with its cigar-friendly sliding glass door.
The chauffeur opened the passenger-side door, and a very tall man unfolded his six-foot-six-inch frame and walked toward the main entrance. Morning sun silhouetted his broad shoulders, and inside my office, we were ready for him: coffee brewed, muffins arrayed, orange juice poured.
This was important company, for the tall stranger was none other than former Duke University basketball player G. Richard (Rick) Wagoner, then president and CEO of General Motors. The scene of his arrival at my modest office complex is forever etched in my memory, for it marked the end of a long, convoluted rapprochement that had developed in fits and starts. It also signaled the beginning of a presumed three-year relationship with GM that was to last almost nine years and would prove to be both the most rewarding as well as the most frustrating epoch in my career.
I was, at this juncture in 2001, nearing seventy. After retiring at sixty-six as vice chairman of Chrysler in 1998, I’d written my book Guts, and was serving as CEO of troubled Exide Technologies. (Talk about troubled: my predecessor CEO, his president, and the CFO had been indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to hard time in federal penitentiaries for committing a veritable Chinese restaurant menu of state, local, and federal felonies.Trying to raise much-needed new capital or find new customers for a company this tarnished was near impossible. And all this took place before the larger, more publicized Enron scandal. I longed for the ethics and order I knew to be the hallmarks of all the Big Three Detroit OEMs. But, I digress; my Exide time would fill another book.) During those 1998–2000 post-Chrysler years, I encountered a curious phenomenon: journalists, analysts, and supplier executives would, at random intervals, contact me with basically the same question: “What’s wrong with GM? Why can’t they get it right? What would you do?”
This sentiment intensified to the point where the late Heinz Prechter, an influential Detroit resident and founder of American Sunroof Corporation (later just ASC), started hatching a coup: he would assemble a complete senior management team (essentially him, me, and Steve Miller, America’s emergency-CEO for companies in Chapter 11), raise capital, buy GM shares, and then talk the GM board into cleaning out the existing top management. It was a grand scheme, and it consumed several afternoons and evenings at Prechter’s estate on Grosse Ile. Prechter, in a manic phase of the bipolar disorder that would ultimately claim his life through suicide, rubbed his hands with glee over what he called “the big one.” Sadly, or perhaps luckily, it came to naught.
And there were others.J.T. Battenberg, then CEO of Delphi, the parts and