The “saving” of the American auto industry has become a comedy of errors, a circus with
seemingly no good end in sight.
Feeling somewhat helpless about it all, I decided, in that great American business tradition, to
send a memo!
Memo - To Rick Wagoner (GM), Alan Mulally (Ford) and Robert Nardelli (Chrysler):
1) You’re all fired.
Please leave this memo behind for the new leaders of your companies.
(Top photo, GM CEO Rick Wagoner, left, and Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Show at the group's annual Las Vegas convention. Sharing the stage is the GM/Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid concept, now a dead issue unless GM gets a cash infusion which some analysts say must be close to $22 billion, otherwise the company will be history).
2) America doesn’t trust you.
Most Americans think you have brought this disaster upon yourselves, with inferior, irrelevant 
products the past 35 years.
3) Stop fighting.
Since 1970, when the EPA and NHTSA were created, you have fought tooth-and-nail every
advancement and improvement in your industry.
In doing so, you’ve wasted untold billions of dollars and the efforts of thousands of your
smartest and highest-paid employees.
4) Don’t build what we don’t need.
Shoe-horning your biggest V8 engines into full-size trucks and SUVs, because it was an easy
way to make hundreds of millions of dollars, is wrong. And selling them to an audience conditioned to buy them is also wrong.
(Photo above right, what possible statement Chrysler is making with this shot of their newest Ram truck atop a Dodge flatbed escapes me. Why hand it out to the media? It can only result in bad jokes. Photo, above left, Robert Nardelli was hired by Cerberus to run Chrysler, but with no experience in the car business, one wonders why they really hired him for this job; Cerberus also hired Jim Press, highest-ranking American in Toyota/Lexus/Scion, but he has to report to Smilin' Bob, and we haven't seen Press' name in the news lately. He might be biding his time until his contract is up; he is a very smart guy).
5) Create a 21st century franchise system along with your dealerships.
Though there’s much to be done, a good start is to instill a version of GM’s Saturn sales
system in your showrooms; that would surely be welcome by car-buyers.
Click below for more on why Detroit must change now - or die!
6) Forget about the next quarter.
Detroit lives and dies by one quarterly result after another. All your employees, and you, 
should be thinking of ways to keep your factories open 50 years from now as well as one
year.
7) Stop blaming the unions.
Workers build vehicles only as good as their design. Bad designs = bad cars. And new car
“blueprints” come from your white-collar employees, not blue-collar.
8) Stop blaming the government.
Yes, government-mandated rules and regulations cost money. But in spite of the cost they’ve
added to cars and trucks, Americans would not give up airbags, anti-lock brakes, traction
control, roof standards and rollover protection, improved mileage, lower emissions or all their
electronic in-car gadgets for a slightly lower price.
Companies should never automatically rollover to any government, but common sense and our
shared futures must be important parts of all Washington/Detroit negotiations.
(Photo above right, Lincoln has a very nice-looking car called MKS which they are marketing as a V6 turbocharged/direct injection performance machine; above left, Alan Mulally left Boeing, which has one competitor, to run Ford, which has 25-50 competitors in the US alone. He took the job after he got a near-$20 million signing bonus).
9) Encourage all sides to participate.
The “enthusiast media,” those newspapers, magazines, websites and radio and TV shows
which are supported by the industry’s advertising dollars and which wax rhapsodic about
almost every new vehicle, are, to many, important sources of information. But both the auto
industry and government have another responsibility in a free society; that is, to fund media
outlets which encourage an ongoing national conversation about your industry and its many
ancillary parts. Remember that one out of every ten jobs in America is connected in some way
to the auto industry; worldwide, that number is one out of every seven manufacturing jobs.
10) If you build it, we will buy.
A great opportunity awaits us on the other side of this crisis; that rare chance to make a 
fresh start in our lives, schools, corporations and government. We all get a chance to make a
difference. And your company’s get a chance to build great, relevant cars and trucks.
One person who made a huge difference in the auto industry, and through it, in Japan, the US
and the world, and whom you and all your employees can learn from, was Dr. W. Edwards
Deming.
His name is worth Googling. Dr. Deming is possibly the most important American that most
Americans never heard of.
(Above, the 25,000th Dodge Viper comes off the assembly line, and NASCAR driver Kurt Busch was given the car as a gift from Chrysler in honor of his staying with the Penske South racing team and driving a Dodge to several big victories, below left, Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his wife, Lola, in Japan, 1978, below right, why don't we ever get to have any fun? This Smart was outfitted by Euro aftermarket performance company Brabus, and the car won't be sold in the US).
In Japan, from 1950 onward, he taught top management how to improve design (and thus
service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets) through various
methods, including the application of statistical methods.
He was, as I called him in several articles written after lengthy interviews and attending his
four-day management seminar at UCLA in the mid-1980s, “The American Who Invented
Japan.”
Despite being considered something of a hero in Japan, Deming was only beginning to win
widespread recognition in the US at the time of his death (at age 93 in 1993).
The Detroit Three should study Dr. Deming at every level of your corporations. Teach his
theories and instill his methodologies into action at every level of GM, Ford and Chrysler
(spoken like a true believer, right?).
We’ll have more memos for you in the future, Detroit Three, so stop by often. And good luck; 
remember, we’re here to support you as soon as those first new and safe high-mileage cars
and trucks roll out of those brand-new and retro-fitted, modernized factories of yours.
And if by that time you’ve merged into the Detroit One, we’d be happy with that, too. Our
patriotism knows no bounds; just build relevant vehicles, and never take us, your potential
customers, for granted.
And readers, let us know what we may have failed to mention, as well as where you think
we’re wrong. And answer this: Why do you think Congress and the White House agreed to
fund the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street, but can’t seem to find the money for Detroit,
even though the action was approved last December?
I couldn't agree more with the line that Detroit needs to build what people want. My mother just went and bought a Hyundai because it was good on gas and it is a nice little car.
She will never buy a pick up truck but still Detroit thinks she will eventually. It really makes no sense.
Posted by: vinny | November 15, 2008 at 11:35 AM