Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [53]
Product Planning was another area mired in a morass of data, attempting to find a quantitative, reliable, repeatable way to come up with hit products.As with everything else at GM, the approach had sterling intellectual credentials, but in a world driven by whim, fashion, and fluctuating fuel prices, it just didn’t work. Product planners in the car companies I have known tend to be much like finance people: everything must be based on numbers, whether historical or projected.As the numbers get played out in elaborate tableaus of predicted volumes and profits (minus, of course, the volume and profits of other, vaguely similar GM cars displaced by the projected new one), numerical precision tends to be confused with accuracy. It always amazed me to witness a room full of highly educated, intelligent executives looking at Product Planning’s future sales projections, broken down by retail and fleet, with the list of substituted existing GM models calculated down to the single unit five years from now. I frequently punctured that balloon by asking, “Are you quite sure that, in 2012, we’ll lose 581 Cadillac Escalades due to this program? Are you quite sure that 582, or even 585, wouldn’t be a better number?” I’m not sure the irony in my voice ever penetrated the impassable closed-loop walls of Planning’s quantitative fortress, because years later the same type of data would still be presented.The only difference was that, in the later years, it tended to be greeted with more of the scorn and derision it deserved.
The error in the traditional Product Planning methodology is that it crowds out art, creativity, and spontaneous invention. It assumes that automotive consumers are highly rational people who will perform analyses and elaborate feature comparisons before making their purchase.As we well know, they don’t.The customer buys brands, and some are cool, and some aren’t. The customer is highly design-sensitive, and some cars are attractive, and some aren’t. When I was first taken through GM’s hugely complicated “needs segments” model, I said, “OK, your model can find categories of vehicles, but can it identify fashion trends and segments? Would it, for instance, have identified the (highly successful) Chrysler PT Cruiser?”
“Of course we can nail that ‘needs segment’! It’s Macro 389, small multiplace monospace!” would be the response. I argued that identifying a segment for what is essentially a small minivan was not the equivalent of coming up with the highly fashion-oriented, retro-styled PT Cruiser. One was defined by its physical characteristics, the other by the space it occupies emotionally. Endless repetition of this theme did not make much of a dent in the Planning group’s mentality, and this overly analytical approach to the future portfolio is not exclusive to GM. At Chrysler, the group of executives who essentially ran the whole show had developed such disdain for Planning that I, at one point, had to address the Chrysler Planning group en masse and explain that I didn’t dislike them; I just disliked what they did.
As at Chrysler, we learned at GM to use the Product Planning group to do what they were good at: run numbers and conduct analyses of alternatives, with the results sometimes accepted, sometimes not. Some of the future cars were the product of the Planning group, while others were born of the inspiration of the Design group (the natural repository of creativity in an automobile company).
I began pushing some products through to production that were not blessed by Planning, or were not born of their “needs segments” model. One was