Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [97]
One of the things I found I had to do was teach the basics of what constitutes a beautiful interior, beautiful paint, and superb fits of outside sheet metal. Friday after Friday, I was in one engineering shop or another, surrounded by midlevel engineers, designers, manufacturing execs, going over a future model in tiny detail, showing everyone how the same part looked on an Audi or Lexus (we always had one of each for comparison), then asking why we couldn’t execute it like that, and listening to more or less valid answers.
I had to ask myself, and still do today, if it is the proper role of a vice chairman of a $200 billion revenue company to get down in the trenches for hours on end, teaching the love of perfection in the smallest details when perhaps a more impatient autocrat would simply have ordered—nay, demanded—that it happen, laying down a deadline and then firing masses of people if the deadline came and the results weren’t there.
The fact is, though, that my effort to instill into the organization a drive for perfection and customer delight in all things was successful. And still I wonder—was I right? Did I change the core of the product development culture by teaching, or did I rely too much on my own will and my considerable influence to get what I wanted? If the latter, excellence will soon be lost again, and “value engineering” and “Let’s see how much we can cut before the customers start complaining” will rear their ugly heads again. Death by a thousand small cuts, because anytime the company loses the focus of providing the very best it can, delighting the eye, ear, butt, and wallet of the customer more than the competitors do, the inevitable decline sets in.
That’s what happened at Chrysler after I left in 1998. I’d thought the culture had absorbed, permanently, the lessons I had so passionately taught during my stint as president of the company. But the Germans were obsessed with the belief that a massproduced U.S. Chrysler or Dodge had to be much cheaper to produce than an equivalent Mercedes, and so every bit of customerperceptible “worth” and “goodness” was stripped out, with disastrous consequences. (This is a mistaken belief: any U.S. midsize car contains the same parts count, the same engine and transmission technology, the same safety equipment, the same ABS brakes and traction control, the same or similar seats and interiors, much of it from the same suppliers. A Chevrolet Malibu’s material cost is within a couple percent of that of a BMW 3-Series.)
I obviously failed to create a sustainable culture of customer focus and product excellence at Chrysler. But I believe the lesson will “stick” at GM.
But now contrast the highly effective “brilliant despot” approach of Dr. Piëch with that of Ed Whitacre.
Whitacre, of the friendly smile and the deceptive “only a country boy” demeanor (but watch the steely eyes that never really smile) professed no knowledge of the automotive business whatsoever. Furthermore, he didn’t see why he should acquire any. In his eyes, his job at GM was to simplify, to weed out decades-old processes, reports, meeting structures, and approval paths. He correctly concluded that the “long-cycle” part of the company, namely Product Development, was in good shape—no sense tampering there. In other areas, he made a series of senior-level personnel and structural changes that would have been unthinkable in the old GM.
Whitacre was focused on results, and more than any GM CEO before him, on sales results. Complicated, softcover-bound reports containing arcane financial detail were held up to scorn and ridicule, and eliminated. He wanted, and soon got, the “Dick and Jane” version of everything. These very simple, very basic reports gave him all the information a CEO would need to guide the company, without being distracted by minutiae better left to the lower rungs of