THE AUTOEXTREMIST

September 22, 2010

Pinheads, WallSqueaks and Bad Lieutenants: The High-Octane Truth at Full-Throttle.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

(Posted 9/22, 9:30 a.m.) Detroit. That this business continues to be a seething cauldron of brilliance punctuated by flat-out incompetence is undeniable. With a portion of the players actually reveling in a focused commitment to greatness and the rest engaged in a two-steps forward, five-back dance of mediocrity, it’s no wonder that on this Wednesday in late September I find myself asking: Is this the best we can do?

I mean, really, folks. Steven Rattner? Are you frickin’ kidding me? Give me one example – just one – in his much-touted “Overhaul” book that actually counts as a revelation about General Motors. Seriously. What, that it was FUBAR and had been for years? This counts for news? Really? That its vaunted accounting troops were borderline incompetent and the bureaucratic fiefdoms in the “vast middle” were more powerful at times than any chief executive? Wow. And this is why some lesser lights in our esteemed media are falling all over themselves canonizing the little WallSqueak as some sort of Beacon of Light as he conveys his knowledge about one of the most pathetic chapters in American corporate history? I’m sorry, but I think it’s time you all replay the scene from “The Untouchables” when Robert De Niro (as Al Capone) gives his team a little pep talk about teamwork around the dinner table. With a baseball bat. Because right about now it’s clear that it’s going to take a baseball bat rattling across some foreheads to knock some sense into some of you out there.

The GM story - the story of the pre-implosion company at any rate - is in the past. The “old” GM achieved astounding greatness for decades, but by the end of the 70s it started its long, slow march toward oblivion. When I started documenting the decline of GM - and the U.S. auto industry - from both an insider’s and a historical perspective back in June of ‘99, I was viewed as one who was writing incendiary, axe-to-grind attacks at best, and a flat-out malcontent who needed to be taken out at worst, especially to those whose cages I was rattling.

And that was understandable, in hindsight. After all, even though others had danced around the isolated bureaucratic mindset of Detroit in the past in various books and screeds, nobody had done it after growing up personally in the midst of Detroit’s heyday and then having spent over two decades in and around the trenches and the battles and the swirling maelstrom that have come to define the “car biz.” That was different and that was cause for worry.

Because I knew what the Detroit mindset - in all its sedentary, myopic, the-empire-will-live-forever-and-a-day-and-the-good times-were-just-around-the-corner-again - felt like, and I knew what that “first order of business is to cover your ass” mentality smelled like because I had to live with it and witnessed it up close and personal in all of its ugly permutations. And I knew that to attack that piece of this town – the core of its very existence, by the way - was sheer heresy.

But I saw too many good and talented people get their careers blown-up because they weren’t practicing the go-along-to-get-along shuffle that accounted for standard operating procedure in this town and in this business. The kinds of people who could have made a real difference if they had just been allowed to be heard.

And conversely I saw too many pinheads, incompetent fools and unconscionable ball-busting bad lieutenants get promoted and get rich after wreaking havoc wrapped in rampant mediocrity everywhere they went, destroying product programs, killing great ad campaigns and generally wrecking everything they came within 50 feet of. These were the bastards who had to be exposed, this was the behavior that had to be called out in no uncertain terms and this was the “Detroit mindset” that clearly was sending this business - at least as practiced in this town - on the road to ruin.

And I was hell-bent on doing it.

Even though I was viewed as being treasonous by some of the very executives who knew me and had worked with me over the years - especially given my family background - there were others both in the trenches and in the hallowed halls of executive management, however, who knew that I was speaking The High-Octane Truth. And the fact that my writing resonated like a bulldozer in an herb garden could not be ignored, or its impact ultimately contained.

And eleven-and-a-half years later this business, this thing we call the Motor City - aka Detroit, “The Hard Life” - has been praised at times for putting America on wheels, for being the Arsenal of Democracy, and for being one of the steadfast pillars of this country’s manufacturing base. It has also been vilified for countless sins both real and imagined, for squandering its legacy in a choking haze of incompetence, for being a monument to mediocrity and not-invented-here malignance, and for a virulent complacency that’s awe-inspiring in scope and deflating in its impact.

And all of it is true.

That Detroit has changed fundamentally and forever is true, too, and as I’ve said repeatedly the selling of the “new” Detroit – and its ultra-competitive new vehicles – is the toughest marketing job of this or any other era. And with the ever-boiling global market we live in now - which is a cacophony of fractional discord, blatantly malicious governments in the business of business, and brutal, take-no-prisoners competition - Detroit’s success is not only essential to this town and this region, it’s essential to the nation.

Not a popular assessment in this era of rampant national naiveté and crushing lack of awareness as to what this global competition thing really means for this nation going forward, to be sure, but our national epidemic of self-absorption and vacuousness can’t be viewed as an excuse, only as a humiliatingly annoying embarrassment at this juncture.

Instant auto “experts” like our “esteemed” politicians in Washington, Sacramento, Michigan, et al, and the Steven Rattners of the world who parachute in, do their thing and then go off to manufacture horrifically bad legislation or write books stating the painfully obvious - while basically being financed at the taxpayer’s expense - should not be applauded. Instead, they should be called out for what they really are: Two-bit carpet-bagging hacks who couldn’t find a clue if you spotted them the “cl” and the “e” who dine on the American taxpayers’ trough with impunity and without one single shred of remorse.

For the record? That should really piss you off.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week (4,129 days – give or take a day – later).

 

See another live episode of "Autoline After Hours" with hosts John McElroy, from Autoline Detroit, and Peter De Lorenzo, The Autoextremist, and guests this Thursday evening, at 7:00PM EDT at www.autolinedetroit.tv.

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