“There’ll Be Spring Every Year Without You”
At this week’s Senate auto industry hearing, Senator Christopher Dodd noted that a death sentence focuses the mind. It does, but for the US auto industry, it took a humiliating public whipping of its CEOs for this to happen. In my last post, I took Rick Wagoner to task; in The Spider’s Strategy, in a chapter I mostly wrote two years ago, I expressed extreme pessimism about the industry and called Chrysler “the canary in the coalmine.” I can only shake my head in disbelief at Boards of Directors which trust executives who lack basic common sense: You don’t go begging for alms wearing Armani suits and flying corporate jets!
I have had the good fortune to work with several C-level executives, including CEOs and Board members. The common trait across the very best of them: they are astute politicians, who understand how to build coalitions, not just of the like-minded, but of those whose interests are not aligned with theirs. Detroit’s top executives, in contrast, did not see this in political terms. That they publicly displayed such naïveté speaks volumes about their companies’ culture: Imperialistic, with CEOs as monarchs who believe that the world would be truly worse off if they were not around. No wonder they are isolated from the real world!
In contrast, a very successful Chairman of the Board of a global company I’ve worked with had an office with glass walls which was about half the size of typical bedroom. It was located next to the operating area of a key business unit. It is not unusual for the CEO to walk into the company’s break room to pick up his own coffee. He had lunch with small groups of new hires. When I reported that a long-time employee had asked when old timers would be similarly invited, he immediately asked his secretary rectify his error; he invited his critic and a few other long-timers whom the critic thought he should know. If this CEO ever had to go to Capitol Hill and ask for help (I doubt he’d ever have to), he would not make the errors the Detroit CEOs did. Oh, by the way, this gentleman is probably as rich as, if not more than, them.
In Lerner & Leow’s My Fair Lady, Eliza Dolittle sings to Professor Henry Higgins, “There’ll be spring every year without you/England still will be here without you/ …/And without much ado/We can all muddle through/Without you.” Perhaps Mr. Wagoner, Mr. Nardelli and Mr. Mulally should play this snippet of the movie a couple of times a day on computer/video screens in their offices. It might induce them to leave the rarefied atmosphere of their sanctums and visit the real world more often. Who knows, that might cause them to rebuild their companies with policies more suited for a networked world and so create cars people want to buy. Ironically, of course, there may not be much of a spring for the American economy if these companies are not saved, despite their incompetence.
In the next post – which I promise will be soon – I’ll comment on the substance of the plans and the hearings.