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As one of the executives credited with bringing General Motors back from the brink, 47-year car industry veteran Bob Lutz knows what went wrong in the auto business and how it got corrected. While he doesn't ignore major external reasons (oil crises, Japanese imports, new federal regulations), Lutz argues that GM's biggest problems were self-created. With bracing specificity, he describes how "forward-looking" management placed their faith and their company's fortunes in the hands of "bean counting" analysts who blurred the carmaker's focus on product excellence and customer value. Now retired, he speaks his mind candidly in this classic case study. Editor's recommendation.
A former top GM executive and avowed gearhead warns against the advance of soulless number-crunchers clueless about the hands-on details of the car business.
To Lutz (Guts: 8 Laws of Business from One of the Most Innovative Business Leaders of Our Time, 2003), it's not rocket science: Design and build the cars and trucks that customers want, and the rest will fall into place. This was his job as a GM vice chairman from 2001 to 2010. At the table—if not running the meeting—when most of the big decisions came down, the author, now in his late 70s, was often appalled by youthful bean-counting MBAs with their 4.0 GPAs but no common car sense.What matters, Lutz argues, is having on board at least one automotive artist with the talent to design desirable new cars. The author's talent, equally rare, was recognizing a good design, or a bad one drawn to bean-counter specs. His frequent criticism of the press is sometimes churlish, as when he alleges that unnecessarily harsh and ill-informed lefty journalism gave the Hummer H2—on which he signed off—an unjustifiably bad rep. He closes with the recognition that having a media-savvy, talking-head CEO is now a must and in the best interest of the business in which he worked for 47 years. The author also predicts GM's battery-and-gas-powered Volt will dominate the highways of the future, and he includes close accounts of GM's 2009 bankruptcy, government bailout and subsequent reemergence as a trimmed-down shadow of its former corporate self.
Well worth the ride—if not necessarily the car.
Anonymous
Posted July 23, 2011
There are a few insights to be gained here, for sure, and a peek behind the scenes showing how car companies are managed - but mostly it's just a huge disorganized rant that never seems to be going anywhere. Bob Lutz spends huge swaths of the text railing against the assorted things that he thinks made GM come so close to the brink, you get the feeling that maybe liberal academics, Al Gore, CAFE standards, and labor unions don't really factor in as much as he seems to claim. The premise - that having accountants dictate your product line instead of "product guys" leads to disaster - is an interesting one worth exploring. Instead this comes across as a 200-page quest to find a scapegoat.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 16, 2011
Explains how GM made such poor cars due to a disfunctional organization populated by accountants and MBAs with no understanding of or concern about the customer.
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Overview
A legend in the car industry reveals the philosophy that's starting to turn General Motors around.In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars, and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy.
When Lutz got into the auto business in the early sixties, CEOs knew that if you captured the public's imagination with great cars, the money would follow. ...