Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [42]
GM’s real illness resided, contrary to the foregoing, not in Engineering or the brands, misdirected as they were, but in Design, or, as it was formerly called, Styling. And it was here that I would focus my attention.
Even before officially joining the company, I knew Design was dysfunctional, but from the inside I could now see why. Normally, in an automobile company, and at GM during the golden age of the 1950s and ’60s, the design department reports at a fairly high level and works with engineering, manufacturing, and marketing to design beautiful vehicles that, of necessity, can also be engineered, built, and sold at a profit. This was too simple for the brand-focused GM of the 1990s. One or several of the high-IQ group decided that “great design” could be subjected to a rigorous, multistep process, just like anything else.
The GM creative process began with APEX. (I was never sure what this acronym meant, but assume it was “Advanced Products Experimentation.”) APEX resided in its own building. The employees were “conceptual designers”—that is, they could imagine things but couldn’t actually draw them. Furniture consisted of orange beanbag chairs. Facial hair was rampant, dress was casual, and so was the work routine.The designers’ purpose was to brainstorm, to conjure up that next big hit product that nobody had yet imagined. Free-ranging creativity was the order of the day, and, while I’m absolutely positive that there was no pot smoking going on, if the reader will imagine that there was, it sort of completes the mental picture. The output from APEX included jewels like “Why don’t we do a flying car?” This actually received some attention, as well as a deluge of less extreme ideas which, when rendered on paper, would be researched with the public.The “big idea” was that perhaps out of hundreds of APEX ideas researched, four or five would advance to the next stage. I couldn’t find any.
After APEX, projects moved to an immense studio that looked like a Hollywood set. Crammed with brand-significant “lifestyle” objects, including, weirdly, a yellow Ducati motorcycle, this major investment in “stuff ”—screens, computers, scale models, theatreseating furniture—all had a function I never quite grasped, nor did I particularly want to.
The next step in the convoluted process was the brand studio, the first place where actual, recognizable work was done. Under the leadership of Anne Asensio, a gifted French designer hired from Renault, “Brand” actually produced so-called theme models for upcoming vehicles of each brand. Once Anne’s studios had produced a full-size model deemed acceptable and in keeping with “brand design cues” as handed over from Marketing and Design’s own “Brand Central” (the Hollywood set) studio, it would be handed off to Jerry Palmer’s “production” studios. It was here that the traditional design work, as we know it from other automobile companies, was actually done.
But, there were major problems. First, Palmer had limited freedom in creation, as he was basically handed a “theme” from the brand studios. Second, there was now time pressure from the vehicle line executives, who urged speed to compensate for the inevitable slippage in the upstream labyrinthine process. So Palmer, responsible for delivering finished designs acceptable to the VLEs on time, became adept at very quickly “productionizing” (further diluting) already boring and badly conceived “themes.”
Wayne Cherry, vice president of design and Jerry’s boss, vetoed many of Palmer’s slapdash cars, only to be overridden by the all-powerful VLEs, who had the final say on vehicle aesthetics. Having nondesigners pass judgment on design is a bit like sending a sports bar full of beer drinkers to a wine tasting; besides, the VLEs were all in hot pursuit of one of their prime goals, one on which much of their PMP-determined success would depend: timing!
After killing off some of the more misbegotten