Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [99]
The doubts and secret snickering soon stopped.Within eighteen months, VMA-133, under the command of Art Bauer, was rated the number one reserve squadron in the Marine Corps Reserve, with the highest operational readiness, the highest scores in Inspector General inspections, and the highest scores in ordnance delivery. Those responsible for senior officer selection in the Marine Corps must have been as surprised as we were that this modest, self-effacing man, of limited skills but the right leadership touch, had attained such a level of success. But perhaps they weren’t surprised at all. Maybe they knew that a leader like Art Bauer was exactly what this squadron of self-assured and cocky aspiring doctors, lawyers, and business professionals needed.
The parallels with Ed Whitacre are obvious. In leadership, as in all things, less is often more. I hope and trust that GM’s new leader Dan Akerson will achieve the right balance.
13
If I Had Been CEO
THIS CHAPTER IS HIGHLY CONJECTURAL FOR, AS I STATE FREQUENTLY, boards of directors usually don’t appoint creative right-brainers to the CEO post: there is just not enough predictability, not enough respect for carefully crafted “future scenarios” (which, due to their numerical precision, provide the faint of heart with a false sense of stability and order), too many changes of course, too much emotion and communication. Not only do boards not select people like me, they actually get rid of them when they have them. The fact that the most remarkable business successes were produced by individuals like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Sir Richard Branson does nothing to alleviate the anxiety over their boldness in seeking new products and services. No board was ever going to confer the ultimate responsibility on me, but it’s fun to go down the list and see just what I might have done differently had I come in as CEO in 2001 instead of as vice chairman.
I am not even tempted to claim that the final outcome, Chapter 11, could have been averted. The corporation was so overextended, so heavily in debt, so burdened with a drain of $6 to $7 billion per year for so-called legacy costs, that the double whammy of the spring 2008 subprime mortgage meltdown, coupled with the unpredicted (and unpredictable) jump in fuel prices to well over four dollars a gallon, would have overwhelmed even the best-managed company.
There are, however, many areas where I would have acted differently.
The Lutz regime would have been focused on product first and foremost. In terms of capital and engineering budgets, I would have spent more, rather than less. Believing as I did that alternative fuel vehicles like Volt represented an opportunity to change the public’s (erroneous) perception of GM as a reckless producer of gas guzzlers, I would have accelerated the creation of hybrid vehicles as well as all-electric prototypes and auto show concept cars. It’s not that there was, or is today, a huge market for the things. It’s just that the media praise those who make them and smother them in superlatives for their environmental correctness. Those who eschew them are greedy, shortsighted, or technologically incompetent.
In fairness, we did have one such program that received a huge amount of annual research budget and which GM hyped to the limit of its communications skills: the hydrogen fuel cell.
The problem with our fuel cell program was that, despite GM’s best efforts, the world saw it as “vaporware.” Aided, no doubt, by some of our esteemed competitors, the media’s general conclusion was that, with our dearth of fuel-efficient vehicles and our failure to produce hybrids, we were dangling the sugar plum of a carbon-free future in front