Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [36]
In short, we had a very expensive interior that looked cheap. Clearly, not something to shoot for. I got a lot of practice that Saturday doing something that would be required of me for the next few years: finding ways to point out the excellence of a vehicle while dismissing the weak points as a matter of taste, all without destroying my credibility with the media. They knew I knew the difference!
The evening after the Pebble Beach Concours,Wayne Cherry, vice president of GM Design, invited me to his ground-floor suite at the Pebble Beach Lodge. Sitting at a table on the elegant patio, Wayne produced some thick binders. These, he announced, contained photographs of all the projects Design was currently working on.
It was a horror show.
The photos Wayne showed me confirmed the worst suspicions I’d harbored since seeing the board meeting prototypes. But these were worse, some in earlier stages of development, but all noncompetitive. For each picture, Wayne would ask me what I thought. As diplomatically as possible, at least initially, I tried to keep my words from being hurtful, with phrases like, “Umm, that has some nice elements, but it’s really misproportioned.” Wayne quickly set me at ease: “I don’t like any of these, either. Most of them are really awful.” I did find this strange, since Wayne was, at least in title, the head of GM Design and, as such, responsible for the aesthetics, inside and out, of the company’s vehicles.Yet, proposal after proposal, Wayne would ask, “How do you like this one?” and I’d say, “Jeez, Wayne, it’s god-awful,” and Wayne would say, “You’re right. I hate it, too.” After about ten of these, I said, “Wait a second, Wayne! These are your vehicles. It’s your design team that did them. How can you trash them?”
“Well,” Wayne replied, “in a normal company, you’d be right. But this is GM, and we have VLEs.” Vehicle line executives, modeled after Toyota “shusas,” are very powerful senior executives, usually engineers, who act as program managers for individual vehicle programs as they progress through the gestation process from sketch all the way to production. GM had refined the VLE system and had, as was so frequently the case, gone the extra mile in conducting elaborate psychological testing to make sure these men and women were up to the responsibility. But the VLEs, mostly men with two excellent women, were by and large a fine and experienced group and dedicated to accomplishing their mission.
Where the GM system departed from similar program manager schemes at other automobile companies is that the VLEs were given responsibility for design. Sure, the designers belonged to Wayne Cherry, but the decisions, the aesthetic judgment, the green-lighting of a proposal were all under the purview of the VLE. Wayne could criticize, argue, and harangue, but mostly the VLEs didn’t listen. They had other priorities: In the VLE’s list of objectives, attainment of which would be crucial to his or her future compensation, the words “world’s most appealing sedan in the segment” were nowhere to be found. Instead, quantified objectives covered cost (good!), investment, quality, warranty cost, assembly hours per vehicle, percentage of parts reused from the prior vehicle (believed to be the secret to Toyota’s success), and, important to note, time to program