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By Root 971 0

Tom Davis, was still in office, helping with my transition into the company. Tom was a seasoned engineer, a GM lifer who had presided over the fantastic transformation of GM from an also-ran in the truck business into a near-dominant player. It is a testament to the excellence of the Detroit truck teams that, perhaps due to decades of benign neglect by top management, they knew their competition (there were only three players), knew their customers, understood the business and its demands, and always had a burning drive to set the bar higher with the next full-size truck or SUV. And this is why, despite repeated efforts, the vaunted Japanese could never put more than a minor dent in the Detroit Three when it came to the big stuff. The media would always gleefully announce that “Detroit’s last bastion, the full-size truck” was about to fall now that Toyota had launched the new Tundra, or Nissan the Titan, but show me the owner of any American full-size truck or SUV who is just dying for a Japanese offering.

Tom was a good executive and administrator, and his meetings reflected this. It was all very procedural and process-focused. Are the engineering releases on time? Why are we behind on that prototype build? Has program X passed such and such a “gate”? Why is it late? What’s the plan for recovery of the lost time?

It was all tactical—work that had to be done, of course—but in the company’s most senior product meeting, where was the strategy? What kinds of cars do we want to make, and why? Why are we failing?What needs to happen to turn this around? How do we raise our game? Meetings under Davis were more akin to the cleaning and maintenance of a complex machine that, on the car side, was producing the wrong products.The quality gurus preach “doing it right the first time and every time.” And that was what the GM product development process was doing. But what never got said by the “Total Quality Excellence” consultants of the 1980s and ’90s was that one must, above all, do the right thing right the first time. Perfect mediocrity, as GM had shown, was doomed to fail.

Tom, his health failing, soon retired. He left with some trepidation: having read my first book, Guts, he had grave worries that this “opinionated swashbuckler” (a title long ago bestowed on me by the head of human resources at Ford) would dismantle or seriously modify the carefully crafted, predictable, reliable, and seemingly risk-free process that was turning out one terminally dull passenger car and crossover after another.

Actually,Tom’s fears were well-founded, but I like to think of what I subsequently did as “creative destruction.” Soon, I became immersed in GM’s brands and their future products. I was scheduled for lengthy meetings with the brand teams led by very smart young men and women, all equipped with big brains and sterling academic credentials. Significantly, I was not allowed to look at the products until I had been subjected to seemingly endless presentations on the quintessential character of, say, Buick or Saturn. This involved staring at large boards on which were proudly displayed the “brand pyramid,” a huge triangle broken into fields containing profound (but painfully obvious) information on the customer and why he or she would buy this brand. All of this was invariably accompanied by a wall of photography showing unbelievably good-looking people of all genders and races who would form the typical customer base of, say, the forthcoming Buick Regal. Other pictures would follow—homes, furniture, watches, sunglasses, pens, pots and pans, and (almost without fail) a golden retriever or two, all indicative of the mood, or soul, of the brand.

It was unmitigated hogwash; almost any of the boards, including the human models and the pots, pans, dogs, and tropical fish, could have been assigned to any of the brands. And, far from being peopled by upscale urban sophisticates, our passenger car owner base was comprised largely of corporate or rental fleets and the less educated, less affluent, less photogenic Americans whose main reason for