Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [26]
Another more harmless anecdote came from my good friend, the late David E. Davis Jr., dean of automotive writers, lecturer, author, pioneering writer at Car and Driver, and founder of Automobile magazine. A sought-after speaker highly knowledgeable about our industry, David accepted a gig as speaker to a large group of GM executives. The speech appeared to go well, and the applause felt genuine. David went home pleased and thought no more about it until he received the following letter:
Dear David:
You asked for feedback on your remarks at our recent conference. The data is just now available.
The rating scale was zero to ten with ten being “best.” The five non-GM speakers had scores ranging from zero to ten. Yours ranged from three to ten. The five “outside speakers’” average scores ranged from 5.25 to 8.25.
Your average was 7.35.
Two speakers had higher scores than yours.Your standard deviation from the mean was 1.719 and ranked second among the variances, showing that most people had a similar opinion about your remarks.
I personally enjoyed your remarks very much. Your refreshing candor, coupled with your broad understanding of people, product, and the market, gave us exactly what we asked you for—“widened competitive awareness.”
Thank you for your participation.
Signed:
Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group
An “outside speaker effective analysis group”? Implausible, yes, but I am not making this up.This was the result of too much money and too many overly educated, almost academically oriented people focusing their ray guns of unbridled excellence on targets of complete irrelevance.
A few years before jumping the GM ship and going to BMW in 1971, I was asked to go to Detroit to explain Opel’s proposed midsize car (then Ascona, later Vectra, roughly analogous to the Chevrolet Malibu in the United States). Mr. Roche was not going to approve the appropriation request because he did not believe any of the analysis demonstrating the market opportunity for the car.
I flew to Detroit, reported to Mr. Roche’s secretary, and was asked to wait in his vast hotel-lobby-like outer office. For days I arrived at 8:00 AM and left at 5:00 PM, watching the great man stride past me with nary a nod of the head, waiting for hours as a dog would wait for his master, only to have him emerge and depart his office with again no acknowledgment of my humble self. It was clear that I was being punished as the father of the midsize European car proposal.
Finally, the big day came. I was almost in disbelief as I entered Roche’s inner sanctum and actually saw him leafing through Opel’s proposal. After a few minutes, in his usual soporific monotone, he said, “I don’t believe any of this.Take this presentation to the head of my personal special analysis group. He’ll take it apart and do his own analysis, and I’ll believe that one.” So I sought out this man—let’s call him Jack Brown: young, well-groomed, handsome, and superbly tailored. The conversation went something like this: “Hi. I’m Jack Brown, and I’m really busy. What’s the problem? Oh, he didn’t believe the numbers. OK, how many charts do you have? Is this the market growth line? Will it hurt you if I pull it down a quarter of an inch? OK, that one’s done. Now, is this midsize segment growth? Tell you what, I’ll increase this one to compensate for taking the total market down.” (He sketched in a slightly larger “midsize” pie slice.)
And so we zipped through twenty-odd charts, graphs, and tables in twenty minutes. “Take the whole thing to George over there,” Brown told me. “Tell him to put it on Roche’s special slides with the orange borders. That’s the sign that my group did the analysis. I hope you’re not in a hurry; best if we wait a week so he’ll think I actually did something. He’ll approve it, don’t worry. Glad to help. Gotta go now.” And with that, he disappeared