Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [94]
Sounded logical to me, so upon my return to GM I immediately and enthusiastically repeated the message from the dean. I met a stony reception. “Yes, we’ve heard all that before, and we’re not buying.We have a standard, and it’s called ‘the 3.0 GPA.’ There are plenty of students who are both hands-on and get their academic work done. Anyway, you have to draw the line somewhere, and a 3.0 GPA is where we drew it years ago!”
“But surely,” I countered,“we would consider an exception in the case of a sub-3.0 student who is personally and highly recommended by the dean himself?”
“Well, no, we would not. Our insistence on academic excellence is a long-standing policy, and it has served us well over the years.” Oh, really?
The highly creative 2.5-GPA hands-on candidates then find employment with smaller companies, foreign and domestic, where the emphasis is on creating hardware and inventing new solutions as opposed to looking and sounding brilliant while essentially tackling nothing. Small wonder that many new automotive technologies and components are brought forward by suppliers to the large automotive companies: the supplier companies had to “make do” with all those “dumb” 2.5-GPA engineering graduates. I will bet that the two young engineers at Chrysler who (without authorization) tinkered with a company car over several weekends and, at low cost, created the first U.S. manual-shift feature for automatic transmissions were not 3.5-GPA intellectuals.
Thus, as is so often the case, we see quantified “rules” overwhelming common sense. The result, ultimately, is a failure to achieve excellence.Thanks to a pervasive bias toward an ever more analytical, intellectual approach to business as taught by America’s esteemed graduate schools of business, we are churning out armies of bright young executives, all skilled in numbers and businessspeak, all eager to reduce cost and game the system for evergreater short-term benefit. (After all, we do get measured every quarter, and we do have stock options that we want to see “in the money.”)
But where, I ask, is the business school that preaches, above all, acceptance of the obvious, simplicity, and that uncommon virtue, common sense? Where is the business school program tailored to the highly intelligent, creative, right-brained individual who senses rather than analyzes, whose mind skips countless spreadsheet analyses and sees right to the solution? Where is the business school course entitled “Customer Delight as a Key Factor in Business Success?” Maybe there is one. I surely haven’t heard of it, and I can vouch for the fact that GM didn’t hire any of the graduates. I’d like to teach such a course, but it would not be popular in the school, because my basic and simple lesson would be this:
If you’re running a dog food company, your “food chemistry” can be brilliant, the ingredients healthy and procured at an optimized low cost. Manufacturing and canning can be done on the latest, low-labor equipment. The young, motivated workforce can be nonunion. Marketing and advertising can be researched, focusgrouped, and tested to perfection.The balance sheet and accounting practices can be the envy of the category. Logistics