Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business

by Bob Lutz

Overview

“One of the most acute books about management and how com­panies work in practice that I have read in a long time. If anyone wants to know exactly how the U.S. auto industry got into trou­ble, here is your guide.”
—John Gapper, FINANCIAL TIMES
 
When Bob Lutz got into the auto business in the early 1960s, CEOs knew that if you captured the public’s imagination with innovative car design and top-quality crafts­manship, the money would follow. The “car guys” held sway, and GM dominated with bold, creative leadership and iconic brands like Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, GMC, and Chevrolet.
 
But then GM’s leadership began to put its faith in numbers and spreadsheets. Determined to eliminate the “waste” and “personality worship” of the bygone creative leaders, management got too smart for its own good. With the bean counters firmly in charge, carmakers, and much of American industry, lost their single-minded focus on product excellence and their competitive advantage. Decline soon followed.
 
In 2001, General Motors hired Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. As vice chairman, he launched a war against the penny-pinching number crunchers who ran the company by the bottom line and reinstated a focus on creativity, design, and cars and trucks that would satisfy GM’s customers.
 
Lutz’s commonsense lessons, combined with a generous helping of fascinating anecdotes, will inspire readers in any industry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591846222
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/28/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	649,647
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

BOB LUTZ held senior leadership positions at Gm, ford, Chrysler, and BMW over the course of an unparalleled forty-seven-year career, culminating in his vice chairmanship of General motors from 2001 to 2010. He is the bestselling author of Guts: 8 Laws of Business from One of the Most Innovative Business Leaders of Our Time.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition vii

Preface xi

1 The Beginning 1

2 An Unstoppable Force 7

3 The Beginning of the End 13

4 A Failed "Culture of Excellence" 40

5 Ground Zero 74

6 "Here's What We're Going to do First" 80

7 Tackling the 800-Pound Gorilla 109

8 Learning to Go Global (What Took So Long?) 132

9 Chevrolet Volt: ("I'll Let You Explain it to the Board") 145

10 Meltdown and Rebirth 167

11 What's With American Business Anyway? (Ask the Dogs!) 196

12 Of Management Styles 203

13 If I Had Been CEO 212

14 And in Conclusion 227

Acknowledgments 231

Index 233

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Norman Dietz provides a steady-paced, documentary-style approach to this intriguing material. Lutz's comments will appeal to anyone interested in the fascinating world of auto manufacturing." —-Library Journal Audio Review

Editorial Reviews

This book should be required reading for every young person who seeks a business degree. That applies equally to the current management of GM.”

—David E. Davis, Jr., former editor and publisher of Car and Driver

“This is exactly what you’d expect from Bob Lutz: no holds barred, no punches pulled, and no stone left unturned. It’s a true insider’s perspective and a great read.”

—Stephen J. Girsky, vice chairman of General Motors

“Car Guys vs. Bean Counters is the best book written by an auto industry insider since Iacocca in 1984, and deserves to be shelved alongside Alfred P. Sloan’s management classic, My Years with General Motors.”

—Fortune

From the Publisher

Lutz shares his philosophy on running a successful business, which he developed during 47 years in auto manufacturing, including leadership positions with each of the Big Three firms. Lutz blames Detroit's steady decline on overdependence on bean counters and the lack of "his type" (designers) in auto manufacturing. He asserts that the Big Three should return control to the "product guys" like him, of course. Lutz provides an interesting inside perspective on GM and his struggles with high labor costs, rising gas prices, and model design flaws. Expectedly, Lutz sees a silver lining in GM's emergence from the 2008 bankruptcy, while serving up a nostalgic view of a bygone Detroit when GM had annual sales revenue exceeding that of many European countries. AudioFile's Best Voices of the Century winner Norman Dietz provides a steady-paced, documentary-style approach to this intriguing material. Lutz's comments will appeal to anyone interested in the fascinating world of auto manufacturing, especially boomers who grew up driving Detroit iron. Also recommended for university libraries supporting business curricula. [The Portfolio hc, published in June, was a New York Times best seller.—Ed.]—Dale Farris, Groves, TX

Library Journal

Norman Dietz’s wise-guy delivery works well with this memoir/exposé by one of the most productive and confident innovators the auto industry has ever known. Bob Lutz, whose 49 years in the industry were marked by remarkable product initiatives, tells how he repeatedly battled the myopic profit obsession that destroyed U.S. car quality and squandered customer loyalty in the last century. He says the principal forces in the decline of U.S. carmakers included negative media bias, intransigent unions, and headstrong corporate leadership that underemphasized quality and marginalized creative people. Dietz has a knack for making technical anecdotes sound accessible. He also moderates the author’s bravado well enough to keep it from overpowering the narrative, which is full of important lessons for American business leaders. T.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2011 - AudioFile

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.

Kirkus Reviews