Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [37]
So this was the environment in which our VLEs operated. Speed, speed, speed. Things had to be right the first time; going back for a redo would blow the timing. Typically, design research involves testing a future proposal against known competitors in a so-called “product clinic” involving hundreds of selected respondents. I suspected that GM hadn’t actually researched any of the vehicles I was seeing, or at least that the methodology was wrong. Neither turned out to be the case: these lackluster designs had all gone through product clinics, and they had all failed. But a complete redo would have been too time consuming, so it became a matter of “Can we quickly fix the part they hated the most without blowing the timing?”
Cherry, mindful of the damage these aesthetically challenged dogs would do to his reputation, protested and didn’t sign the VLEs’ “contracts”—documents blessed by the head of every major function stating agreement with the vehicle program as constituted and promising support to make it happen on time. Theoretically, if a function as important as Design refused to sign a contract, the program was not to proceed. But Wayne was known by this point as the lone critic and eternal pain in the butt, the guy who was never pleased, so why listen to him? “I’ll just blow my timing and, besides, Wayne’s guys signed off.”
And so, a marginalized Wayne Cherry saw program after program proceed to production despite his specific dissent. At this point, the hard-charging reader will say, “Why did he put up with a situation like that? Why didn’t he complain to senior management, even lay his job on the line?” The answer is that designers are artists, and artists, by and large, are gentle souls and have little or no taste for harmony-destroying conflict.
This is why we were staring at binders full of pictures of full-size clay models that were pathetically inadequate in terms of triggering any “buy me” lust in the viewer. I now knew what I was facing. First, I was going to have to get Design back in charge of vehicle aesthetics, and let Design run design.We had, as I recall, fourteen VLEs. There is not any car company anywhere in the whole wide world that has fourteen senior people capable of making sound aesthetic judgments on vehicle design. Most companies, if they’re lucky, have two or three. If the CEO or the president is one of them, it makes things much easier. Some companies have none, or none for a while, and that explains the oft-observed sudden loss of style by some companies who had previously done well in that area.
I knew also that I was going to have to wrest control of Design away from the VLEs (who were all to report to me), and I thought I was going to have to keelhaul product research. I also realized that many of the programs were too far down the execution pipeline to stop.They’d appear two or even three years after my arrival, and inevitably I would be held responsible for them.
I briefly wondered whether, perhaps, signing on with GM had been a bad idea. As my first day approached, I began to ponder what I had seen and heard, both officially and anecdotally, about GM and its core North American operation thus far. I hoped I could make a difference.
6
“Here’s What We’re Going to Do First”
THINGS STARTED