Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [54]
I asked Design to start a full-size HHR model, and this caused considerable consternation. In the hands of Bryan Nesbitt, who had designed the PT Cruiser before coming to GM, the full-size clay was termed “out of process.” Not fully understanding the term, I discovered that “the process” called for six more months of analysis before the decision would be made regarding possible derivatives of the Cobalt compact architecture. It was too early to settle on one! I wanted to know why. “Because there might be other, better, alternatives.”
I countered, “Like what? You have a sedan and a coupe.You can’t do a pickup.What on earth could you possibly come up with other than this high-cube, cool retro model?” Well, there was no answer that made any sense, and it was clear that the HHR idea was the only viable option, but the point was, it was in violation of “process.” In this particular case, and in many others, slavish adherence to a predetermined, rigidly followed sequence of events merely slowed precious time to market. Over time, and especially in the case of the Pontiac Solstice, “process” and its application became more flexible.
A digression: What I call the “process religion” stems from the 1980s and 1990s “Total Quality Excellence” consultants, who descended upon corporate America like a swarm of rapacious locusts. It was generally argued that Japanese manufacturing superiority was due to a rigid adherence to “standardized work” in the assembly and machining plants. Every worker, no matter which shift or plant, was to perform a given operation in a rigid, unvarying way. No experiments by the worker were permitted, no using both hands to feed the line faster if that wasn’t what the “process” called for. In this way, variability was taken out of the factory environment and reliability, predictability, and quality was put in. So far, so good, and a valuable lesson for the West. But then the concepts of “process” and “standardized work” were expanded beyond manufacturing. If it’s good for the factories, some reasoned, why wouldn’t it be good for every other part of the company, even the creative ones?
Here is where the profound intellectual error was made: the rest of the company isn’t a factory. Almost nothing is done repeatedly, exactly the same way, a thousand times per day. Whether it’s Design (the least amenable to standardized work), Sales, Marketing, Purchasing, Engineering . . . new situations, vendor products, competitive actions, legal changes, and software upgrades occur daily and weekly. The attempt to reduce these activities, which require flexibility, adaptability, initiative, and “Hey, let’s try this shortcut” thinking, to a “process” merely results in an unthinking, robotic organization where everyone is on autopilot.The best part is that if you follow process and the result stinks, you’re safe: you did what you were told. A lot of money was misspent in the last couple of decades of the last century on process apostles.
At any rate, my healthy disdain for an orderly but failing planning process came to be accepted by the planners, and we achieved a satisfactory and often humor-filled mutual tolerance between the unfettered idea guys (me and the growing number of right-brained creative people now enjoying greater autonomy and flexibility) and the mechanistically data-focused planning activity. Neither liked the way the other operated; both recognized the value of what the other was doing.
One curious cultural characteristic I encountered at GM was an exaggerated respect