“Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business”
Bob Lutz, Portfolio (241 pages, $26.95)
Bob Lutz, the former vice chairman of General Motors, describes how executives armed with master’s degrees drove America’s biggest automaker into the ground. Yes, union demands contributed to GM’s ignominious skid into bankruptcy protection. Government meddling didn’t help, either. Then there’s the murderous cost advantage foreign carmakers hold: Their health care expenditures are nonexistent or minimal thanks to universal medical coverage funded by taxes on society as a whole, as Lutz reminds us.
Yet GM’s fatal flaw was more insidious, Lutz suggests.
GM’s product-development system, it turns out, was giving powerful senior executives, not designers, the final say on how a car would look, he says. The execs were understandably preoccupied with quantifiable objectives, such as assembly time, warranty costs, percentage of reused parts and speed of execution. This MBA-driven process, however well-intentioned, produced “perfect mediocrity.” James Pressley, Bloomberg News
