Car Guys vs. Bean Counters by Bob Lutz

Author:Bob Lutz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781591844006
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2011-06-09T07:44:16+00:00

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 for authority. It is bred into the system. Senior people are seen as being in possession of some superior wisdom, to be revered if not downright feared. The reality is that the company’s most senior executives are just people who happened to get promoted and who daily face the insecurity of wondering if they are doing the right thing. The good leader deals with that insecurity by putting forth his or her ideas, then letting subordinates dissect and critique them. At Chrysler, we often had chaotic meetings, where some of my direct reports engaged in behavior that an outsider would have termed insubordinate bordering on mutinous. But that’s when we had the clearest communication and surfaced ideas and opinions devoid of the buffering wads of tissue paper designed to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

At GM meetings, I often found that not a lot got said. Other than “the presenter” (often hardly listened to, because everyone had seen all the material in advance), no voices were heard. In fact, for the most senior meetings, GM invented a crazy system wherein not only the subject presentation was seen in advance, but questions and comments based on the presentation were also distributed. By the time the meeting actually occurred, everyone had read the presentations as well as the usually sycophantic comments (intellectual tours de force, many of them, designed to display the depth of thinking and profound knowledge of the commentator), and only “questions” were dealt with. The answers had also been created in advance, appeared on the big screen, and it came down to asking the original questioner if the written answer satisfied his or her curiosity. It always did.

What was lacking in all this organizational, almost ritualistic perfection was the spontaneous, productive, healthy, sometimes angry discussion that ensues in a less structured format. It was as if the system had been set up for the sole purpose of promoting “smoothness” and lack of discord. An admirable societal goal, perhaps (though I doubt it), but hardly the sign of a high-performance organization.

In my area, Product Development, I could set the tone. I chaired my early meetings—with my staff and the dozen or so vehicle line executives—with my usual blend of outrageous statements, deliberate exaggerations, mild sarcasm, and funny stories. This has usually proven effective for me: people see through it, realize it’s a bit of an act, feel more at ease, and begin to relax and contribute.

Not so in some of my first meetings with the Product Development folks.

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