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By Root 975 0

” often individuals with a strong financial background. As one GM veteran said, “Some diversity is good, but the fact is, few engineering people progressed to operating jobs in the ’80s and ’90s.” It’s not that senior GM management disliked cars. It was more an atmosphere of “benign neglect,” a generalized consensus that we were, after all, primarily in the business of making money, and cars were merely a transitory form of money: put a certain quantity in at the front end, transform it into vehicles, and sell them for more money at the other end.The company cared about “the other two ends”—minimizing cost and maximizing revenue—but assumed that customer desire for the product was a given. Responsibility for creation of the right product was delegated to lower levels in the organization, often to people with little understanding of quality design or great driving characteristics. I maintain that without a passionate focus on great products from the top of the company on down, the “low cost” part will be assured but the “high revenue” part won’t happen, just as it didn’t at GM for so many years.

Take the case of Cadillac: if never quite the “Standard of the World,” it was without a doubt the standard of the United States, technologically advanced and featuring bold styling as part of a strong brand identity. Cadillac was synonymous with power and luxury, and the expression “It’s the Cadillac of [name the product category]” found a justifiable place in the American lexicon.

In the early 1980s, a number of decisions were made that were inimical to the brand’s heritage. A “product guy” (or gal) aware of what had gone before, with a genuine love for Cadillac cars and their owners, would never have pursued such a course. But, to the analytical bean counter, or volume-focused sales executive, such abstract concepts as “image,” “heritage,” and “tradition” were mere smoke screens propagated by the “artistic souls” who didn’t respect spreadsheets, who didn’t want to push for every possible sale.

One of the weirdest acts of mutually assured self-destruction occurred in the 1980s and 1990s: For some unfathomable reason, it was decided that Cadillac needed to greatly expand its sales volume and become the nation’s number one luxury brand.This had always seemed oxymoronic to me: how can any product or service be simultaneously “aspirational and exclusive” while also “most popular in its class” and “near-ubiquitous”? “Best-selling Exclusive Brand” is a phrase akin to “World’s Tallest Midget.” It’s a claim, but is it worthy of being made? At any rate, Ford’s Lincoln brand and Cadillac became embroiled in a battle to near-death to remain “America’s Number One Luxury Brand,” using such weapons as massive deliveries to rental companies, which then ran screaming ads like “Lincoln Town Car: Only $24.95 per Day!” Overstuffing the rental companies, which don’t keep cars long and sell them wholesale with low mileage, naturally resulted in a glut of Cadillacs and Lincolns in the used-car market. Prices, as will happen, dropped rapidly in response to excess supply, and the two luxury brands lost a key attribute: good resale value, or low depreciation. With so many low-priced “nearly new” Cadillacs and Lincolns on the market, it is small wonder that many working-class families started to buy them. With that trend came the loss of prestige, so that the more affluent, better-educated demographics began to shop elsewhere: Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar—brands that were more expensive, arguably of higher quality, and, most of all, in limited supply and therefore “exclusive.”

The nadir came in the late 1990s when the much-followed (in the Detroit media) annual sales race between Cadillac and Lincoln for the dubious honor of “America’s Number One Luxury Brand” (“World’s Tallest Midget”) ended with Cadillac the winner. The Lincoln folks, smelling a rat, did some digging and discovered that Cadillac had counted some sales that were never made. Cadillac had to apologize publicly and hand the crown to Lincoln, which, not knowing it was the kiss of death for