Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [39]
Because Soviet-trained fighter pilots were taught an elaborate sequence of carefully choreographed and endlessly practiced maneuvers to use when entering a combat situation, the Arab MiG and Sukhoi pilots were easy pickings for the Israeli Air Force, which, like its U.S. counterpart, relied on situational assessment, intuition, and flexibility in a fast-evolving air combat situation. The U.S. Marine Corps adage is “No battle plan survives the first two minutes after initial engagement with the enemy.” This lesson was lost on GM.
The North American meetings were little better. Presided over by Ron Zarrella, the previously mentioned brand management guru who had lied about having an MBA, they were equally devoid of pragmatic, customer-oriented focus. Zarrella was soon to depart, returning as CEO to the more comfortable and lucrative world of Bausch & Lomb.
After one particularly dreary meeting, I asked Ron how he, as an outsider, could possibly deal with the clerks-running-thebusiness environment. His candid reply: “You fight it at first; then you see you can’t change it, so you go with the flow.” He was half right! I finally gave up on the administrative thicket but managed, ultimately, to change product development for the (much) better.
A little gem that came up in the North American Strategy Board meeting is the following, which I saved—a “mission statement” of yet another high-minded, high-IQ group:
Creating an enterprise strategy and knowledge development resource to support decision-making of functional and operational organizations attempting to achieve enterprise objectives.
Come again? Zarrella quickly penned a note to me explaining that this was Vince Barabba’s initiative. Barabba was GM North America’s resident intellectual, an author and consultant who was very helpful in the needless intellectualization of a pretty simple business.The initiative “should be cut in half,” the note concluded.
No kidding! But nobody cut it in half, and Ron was president of GM North America. He was the one to do it, but I presume he feared that “they” (Rick Wagoner and Jack Smith) loved Barabba too much to let it happen. Complete elimination is what ultimately took place—but not soon enough.
A salient feature of these top-level meetings was the notable absence of any focus on the thing that matters most: the company’s products. When they were on the agenda, it was always in a highly abstract form: a description of category, size, investment level, cost and profit targets, and other legitimate financial measures. And the discussions were invariably devoid of visuals. No photographs, no design renderings, nothing that would convey any emotional content or any compelling reasons why this particular vehicle would win against the competition. In one endless Automotive Strategy Board meeting, we were faced with an onscreen five-by-five matrix (or maybe even six-by-six) which, in its twenty-five (or thirty-six) cells, listed every known corporate priority. These ranged from “increase market share,” “reduce assembly hours per vehicle,” and “speed time to market” to “achieve diversity targets” and “reduce LTI (senior executive) count.” Buried somewhere in the middle of this grand mosaic was a little cell, no bigger than the others, which read “achieve product excellence.”
I managed, barely, to contain myself. (Remember, I was new!) There, on the screen, was the core of the GM problem: “product excellence” was merely one of twenty-five (or thirty-six) things the company should work on. As I later told Rick Wagoner, that matrix should have been in the shape of a giant sunflower, with a huge “PRODUCT EXCELLENCE” in the giant circular field, with all the other initiatives, helpful as they were to the achievement of the big one, forming the pretty little yellow petals around the periphery.
Meanwhile, over in the Product Development staff meetings, things were better only by a degree. My predecessor,