General Motors has entered a new phase, and Detroit pundits are wondering how old veterans of the wars like Fritz Henderson and Bob Lutz can change its hidebound culture. When I recall the recent obituaries for two former automotive company heads, George Romney and Robert MacNamara, I realize the cultural problems have been there since World War II and are more characteristic of institutions in general than GM in particular.
Automobile companies have always grappled with the tension between creative engineers who design and produce new models and bureaucrats responsible for ensuring their creativity doesn’t lead to bankruptcy. Romney was the one who foresaw the market for small, inexpensive cars when American Motors introduced the Rambler in 1955.
On July 23, 1967, when the Detroit riots erupted, he was governor of Michigan with aspirations to be president. When it took the president, Lyndon Johnson, a day to find a way to send the military to the city without forcing the state to declare a state of insurrection, Romney suspected politics was more important than legality or civil welfare.
That experience with the failure of an institution to react to a serious crisis probably contributed to his growing concerns with the war in Viet Nam. Five weeks later, on August 31, he told a Detroit television interviewer that, when he had visited the war zone in 1965, the generals had misled him, and admitted he no longer accepted the necessity for fighting communism in southeastern Asia.
His political career was over. Those who believed in the war attacked him as personally unfit because he said he’d been brainwashed. Those who opposed the war attacked him for placing the realization of cultural failure beyond his normal experience by ridiculing him for his pipeline to God.
MacNamara rose through the bureaucratic side of Ford where he was always the brilliant implementer of other people’s ideas. Tex Thornton’s the one who told Ford’s grandson, Henry II, he needed to modernize the organization in 1945. MacNamara’s immediate predecessor, Arjay Miller, is the one who went on to spread the gospel of modern management at Stanford after he was fired by Ford.
MacNamara considers his biggest achievement at Ford to have been opposing the Edsel from conception, and finally killing it in 1959. When he realized he was headed for the same kinds of confrontations that led to Miller’s dismissal, he put his resume in the mail and moved on to the defense department.
MacNamara probably understood less about the dynamics of the military than he did the way engineers operate, but he also believed all he needed to do was apply the administrative procedures he’d been taught. Like the engineers at Ford, the generals would handle the rest.
When he began to doubt the success of the efforts in Viet Nam and realized in November of 1967 that he couldn’t influence Johnson he didn’t risk a public confession like Romney. Instead, he put his resume in the mail and moved on to the World Bank.
Again, he saw his job as applying the procedures of others, in this case those of the Chicago School of Economics. When he was judged by the consequences of his actions for the poor of South America, he dismissed his critics as uninformed, and continued the policies prudence and his peers told him were correct.
It’s their lives after Viet Nam that reveal how each man responds to events that threaten all a culture gives him, his world view and self-esteem. Romney became head of HUD during the period Detroit was razed after the riots. He probably didn’t develop the policies that left blocks of vacant land and forced people to move from the city, precipitating more white flight. Still, when you drive through the areas that were once Detroit’s most vital Black neighborhoods, it looks like he permitted revenge by again not questioning the reports of others. He then retired to devote his time to the Mormon church.
MacNamara spent his later years trying to justify his actions in Viet Nam, never, ever recognizing there was any possible link between his actions and the lives of people in Asia or South America. He admitted he couldn’t discern the moral difference between burning people in Tokyo in World War II, and killing them in Viet Nam in the 1960's, not to condemn both, but to justify them.
The difference between the men, I think, is that Romney was comfortable around the creative people at American Motors, while MacNamara was suspicious at Ford. When Romney realized everything he’d been taught was leading to catastrophe, he had the courage to speak out, as a creative person might. When he was punished, he retreated to the familiar. MacNamara always look for the best way to minimize the disaster for himself as a careerist would and never ventured beyond the familiar.
It wasn’t simply that one was altruistic and the other narcissistic. More fundamentally, Romney had the ability to occasionally see familiar things anew. He may have initially been embittered by the reactions of others, but he had enough confidence to know he could find a new life. MacNamara may have been bright, but he never was able to distance himself enough to fully understand the depth of the cultural challenges he faced, and so died genuinely puzzled why he was still so reviled when his intentions had been so culturally accepted
The fundamental difference between the two that determined who could change and who could not was that the one had more imagination, more comfort with creativity than the other, and ultimately less fear of the consequences of crisis, confrontation and change.
Showing posts with label Culture Failure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture Failure. Show all posts
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Point of No Return
I recently read J. P. Marquand’s Point of No Return. The thwarted tale of Charles Gray, a small town boy from a family just below the elite who became engaged to the daughter of that elite, was predictable for anyone who’s lived in such a town. The matter-of-fact style borrowed from Middletown only underlined the familiarity.
While I was reading about Clyde, Massachusetts, General Motors was filing bankruptcy papers in New York, raising once again questions about why its culture chose failure when confronted with serious challenges to its survival.
Marquand’s 1949 novel suggests that GM had not just marketed to the Clydes of the country, but had absorbed the small town social structure with its rigid hierarchy that dictated Cadillac would always be better than Chevy, and both were ordained to always be better than any other division in the company and all better than any possible competitor.
Like Laurence Lovell, a father who would refuse his daughter’s suitor because he and Gray’s father had once disagreed, GM executives believed they could ignore upstarts like Pontiac and Saturn where new ideas actually existed that challenged their world view that the best product was the one with the greatest profit margin. The company felt vindicated when they chased away John DeLorean and Roger Smith, fought off Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, battled Walter Reuther and Roger Penske to a draw, in the same way Lovell was happy when young Gray abandoned any hopes for his daughter, Jessica.
The cultural insularity was partly the product of the company decision to use its own training school, General Motors Institute. The corporation came to prefer men who came up through an organization as rigid as that of the bank described by Marquand where the talented could not be promoted if they’d attended the wrong prep school, joined the wrong fraternity at the wrong college, married the wrong woman, or joined the wrong golf club. Once Gray’s co-worker, Roger Blakesley, was perceived to entertain inappropriate ambitions, he was asked to resign.
Small towns have been dying for a long time because entrepreneurs simply no longer are willing to put up with slights like those Lovell cast on Francis Stanley, the man who bought the local brass works and not only employed most of the men in town, but brought in talented men from outside like the engineer Elbridge Sterne. Sterne married Gray’s sister, Dorothea, and took the relics of her family back to Kansas when he was offered a better job after her father died.
It wasn’t just southern towns willing to lure foreign companies with tax incentives and promises of labor that could be pacified without unions that threatened the economic existence of small towns. Every small company that located in a more open-minded area, where achievement was more important than ascribed status, represented a lost opportunity.
In the end, Jessica Lovell found no one suitable to marry and had to settle for the only single man left from her generation, one who had endured the town, forever conscious of conforming to the rules for advancement. Her now much older father continued to call her fiancé Charles years after he had vanquished that threat. The new man simply remained invisible.
The people who are most angry with GM right now are the dealers in the small Clydes across the country who now are being cut off for not being urban enough. They recognize the irony of being left behind by a company that would prefer to remain more provincial than they.
While I was reading about Clyde, Massachusetts, General Motors was filing bankruptcy papers in New York, raising once again questions about why its culture chose failure when confronted with serious challenges to its survival.
Marquand’s 1949 novel suggests that GM had not just marketed to the Clydes of the country, but had absorbed the small town social structure with its rigid hierarchy that dictated Cadillac would always be better than Chevy, and both were ordained to always be better than any other division in the company and all better than any possible competitor.
Like Laurence Lovell, a father who would refuse his daughter’s suitor because he and Gray’s father had once disagreed, GM executives believed they could ignore upstarts like Pontiac and Saturn where new ideas actually existed that challenged their world view that the best product was the one with the greatest profit margin. The company felt vindicated when they chased away John DeLorean and Roger Smith, fought off Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, battled Walter Reuther and Roger Penske to a draw, in the same way Lovell was happy when young Gray abandoned any hopes for his daughter, Jessica.
The cultural insularity was partly the product of the company decision to use its own training school, General Motors Institute. The corporation came to prefer men who came up through an organization as rigid as that of the bank described by Marquand where the talented could not be promoted if they’d attended the wrong prep school, joined the wrong fraternity at the wrong college, married the wrong woman, or joined the wrong golf club. Once Gray’s co-worker, Roger Blakesley, was perceived to entertain inappropriate ambitions, he was asked to resign.
Small towns have been dying for a long time because entrepreneurs simply no longer are willing to put up with slights like those Lovell cast on Francis Stanley, the man who bought the local brass works and not only employed most of the men in town, but brought in talented men from outside like the engineer Elbridge Sterne. Sterne married Gray’s sister, Dorothea, and took the relics of her family back to Kansas when he was offered a better job after her father died.
It wasn’t just southern towns willing to lure foreign companies with tax incentives and promises of labor that could be pacified without unions that threatened the economic existence of small towns. Every small company that located in a more open-minded area, where achievement was more important than ascribed status, represented a lost opportunity.
In the end, Jessica Lovell found no one suitable to marry and had to settle for the only single man left from her generation, one who had endured the town, forever conscious of conforming to the rules for advancement. Her now much older father continued to call her fiancé Charles years after he had vanquished that threat. The new man simply remained invisible.
The people who are most angry with GM right now are the dealers in the small Clydes across the country who now are being cut off for not being urban enough. They recognize the irony of being left behind by a company that would prefer to remain more provincial than they.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Michael Jackson
The deaths of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson provoke shared moments of cultural shock. We abandoned television for more intimate, interactive media like the internet and Twitter for news updates. Such collective moments of unmediated emotion beg us to ask why.
Superficially the two men were similar. Both were uniquely gifted synthesizers of swirling cultural currents in music, and each expanded the language of the acceptable in popular forms.
Both reached a point where they could do no more without alienating some of their fans. I’ve seen artists as diverse as Harry Belefonte and the Osborne Brothers who try variations on songs they’ve been forced to repeat for years greeted with disapproval by audiences who’ve so internalized their music that deviation could not be tolerated.
Yet, audiences want to see more, want to see something different, and so each could only evolve as performers. The Elvis of Vegas and the Jackson of the tin soldier suits are not the artists we were drawn to, but the products of our demands for new sensations within the confines of the claustrophobically familiar.
We can’t imagine either of them married watching their children play soccer. The hyper-sexuality of the one and the ultra-androgyny of the other could not be domesticated. Our perceptions built cages they couldn’t leave without risking our wrath.
We cut off creative individuals, used to working hard, from either pursing innovation in music or seeking normal domestic lives. To evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald, what possible second act did we permit them?
In the past, religion would have provided a model. But that avenue was closed to these two. Both were raised in strong evangelizing traditions, the Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and already had influenced more people everywhere in the world than any conventional missionary. Presley was perhaps luckier because he could maintain his ties to his past through gospel music.
The secular alternative pioneered by Ezra Cornell to devote one’s second life to philanthropy has been attacked by conservative politicians angered by the social changes supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Both instead used late songs instead like "In the Ghetto" and "We Are the World" to do things aggressively outspoken critics would not otherwise permit.
We put them at the pinnacle of our success pyramid with no place to go. All we allowed was what we could imagine, the excesses of materialism. When they die and we see the consequences, we’re shocked because the emptiness we discover is the emptiness of our closed culture which has no options.
By chance, Presley died when we were struggling with economic problems under Jimmy Carter which we denied by following a less talented performer who could metamorphose into a politician. Jackson died in our current recession caused by the very kinds of excesses we condemned him to live.
What we intuit in their deaths is the failure of our shared world view to function when it is most needed. They become transformed into the canaries of our cultural crises that none of us can escape.
Superficially the two men were similar. Both were uniquely gifted synthesizers of swirling cultural currents in music, and each expanded the language of the acceptable in popular forms.
Both reached a point where they could do no more without alienating some of their fans. I’ve seen artists as diverse as Harry Belefonte and the Osborne Brothers who try variations on songs they’ve been forced to repeat for years greeted with disapproval by audiences who’ve so internalized their music that deviation could not be tolerated.
Yet, audiences want to see more, want to see something different, and so each could only evolve as performers. The Elvis of Vegas and the Jackson of the tin soldier suits are not the artists we were drawn to, but the products of our demands for new sensations within the confines of the claustrophobically familiar.
We can’t imagine either of them married watching their children play soccer. The hyper-sexuality of the one and the ultra-androgyny of the other could not be domesticated. Our perceptions built cages they couldn’t leave without risking our wrath.
We cut off creative individuals, used to working hard, from either pursing innovation in music or seeking normal domestic lives. To evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald, what possible second act did we permit them?
In the past, religion would have provided a model. But that avenue was closed to these two. Both were raised in strong evangelizing traditions, the Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and already had influenced more people everywhere in the world than any conventional missionary. Presley was perhaps luckier because he could maintain his ties to his past through gospel music.
The secular alternative pioneered by Ezra Cornell to devote one’s second life to philanthropy has been attacked by conservative politicians angered by the social changes supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Both instead used late songs instead like "In the Ghetto" and "We Are the World" to do things aggressively outspoken critics would not otherwise permit.
We put them at the pinnacle of our success pyramid with no place to go. All we allowed was what we could imagine, the excesses of materialism. When they die and we see the consequences, we’re shocked because the emptiness we discover is the emptiness of our closed culture which has no options.
By chance, Presley died when we were struggling with economic problems under Jimmy Carter which we denied by following a less talented performer who could metamorphose into a politician. Jackson died in our current recession caused by the very kinds of excesses we condemned him to live.
What we intuit in their deaths is the failure of our shared world view to function when it is most needed. They become transformed into the canaries of our cultural crises that none of us can escape.
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