Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [25]
Can anyone begin to fathom what that card cost—the material and intellectual resources that were squandered in its tortured path to perfection? Does anyone really believe anyone checked the tire tread imprints in the snow? Was the card with the large house, the multicar garage, the expanded hill, and the Cadillac sedan more appropriate and artistically meritorious than the original boy-with-sled?
In a normal culture, that card would have been given to an executive of Roche’s station, who would have looked it over, checked the text (easy in those days; “Merry Christmas” was still a politically correct wish), and said, “Sure, looks good, get ’em printed.” But not in the “Culture of Excellence,” where management had to improve on every detail, no matter how trivial.
The unfortunate thing is that Jim Roche so embodied the charisma-challenged, nitpicking, detail-focused perfectionist that he later became GM chairman and CEO.
I remember another telling event in the late 1960s, while I served at Opel. We had just completed the Dudenhofen Proving Ground, east of Frankfurt, the first modern, totally capable proving ground in Europe.There was much fanfare and media activity, during which we emphasized the huge acreage and the “thirty miles of test roads.” We soon received a telex from the Office of the Chairman: “Why were we claiming thirty miles of roads? The original capital appropriation request, over two years earlier, had listed twenty miles of paved roads. Mr. Roche wants the discrepancy explained.” I drafted a quick reply for my boss, the CEO of Opel, explaining that there had already been about ten miles of forestry roads before we began construction, so, “best foot forward,” we included them in the press release. My boss signed off, and I confidently believed we had heard the last of it.
Wrong. The next telex read, as I recall, “Mr. Roche seeks assurance that no roads not covered by the appropriation request were built. Please submit plans, maps, and aerial photographs, marking, in detail, paved roads covered in the appropriation, unpaved roads or features covered in the appropriation, and preexisting forestry roads not covered in the appropriation.” I put it all together, airmailed it in, and never heard another word. Another example of the grindingly negative, detail-focused, customerdistant “culture of excellence” at work.
Meanwhile, on the product side (where it really mattered), Opel was handed one cost-cutting mandate after another. No “culture of excellence” here, as Opel’s cars were systematically stripped of quality in the name of thrift. The tipping point came in the late 1960s, when Opel was ordered to stop “metal finishing” car bodies prior to paint. Metal finishing and wet sanding after coats of primer gave the painted bodies a smooth, glossy finish, hiding minor imperfections in the metal such as rough welds or minor dents. (Nowadays, this is irrelevant: sheet metal comes out of the presses with such perfection that no wet sanding of the metal is necessary. Back then, it decidedly was.)
It had been decided in the United States that the public would “accept” (not “like,” but “accept”) all kinds of scratches, lumps, dirt, and grinder marks “reading” through the final paint, and so the same “substantial labor saving” was prescribed for Opel. After trying it and hearing dealer reactions (not to mention customer