Books
Few industry figures have won as much respect as Bob Lutz, who over the course of his 47-year career held senior leadership roles at GM, Ford, Chrysler and BMW. That illustrious CV means he speaks from a position of unparalleled authority and inside knowledge.
Lutz takes a common-sense approach to business – he believes that those who run companies should have an affinity with their customers and actually understand what they want. So he reckons that shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and supermarkets by supermarket guys. And it follows, then, that carmakers should be run by car guys.
But that wasn’t the case in recent times in the US automobile industry. The bean counters and number crunchers muscled their way to prominence, elbowing aside more knowledgeable colleagues in manufacturing and engineering who actually knew what they were talking about. And that’s when a whole lot of trouble really started.
Lutz’s new book – Car Guys versus Bean Counters – is an insider’s view of the battle for the soul of American business. With plenty of entertaining anecdotes from within the automotive industry, Lutz picks apart the failings of what became an obsession with numbers and spreadsheets, often at the expense of creativity and product excellence. He describes how from the 1980s onwards penny-pinching became the order of the day, eventually sending many US carmakers into a tailspin that saw them lose their competitive advantage. German and Japanese firms such as BMW and Toyota began to thrash the US giants in their own backyard.
As the decline was played out, GM sank so low that it fell into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Lutz recounts the sorry tale with precise detail. It’s entertaining stuff.
The book is a metaphor for what is happening to many industrial sectors in the US, and in other developed nations. The days of absolute industrial dominance are over, as Asian suppliers steal a march in so many sectors.
But Lutz doesn’t give up hope. He says that by refocusing on the customer, and allowing car guys rather than bean counters to drive the design, manufacturing and selling of new products, Western firms like GM can be restructured and reborn. And there’s signs that that’s already happening. Let’s hope he is proved right.
- Car Guys versus Bean Counters by Bob Lutz. Portfolio Penguin, price $26.95.