From the Publisher
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
Library Journal
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
SEPTEMBER 2011 - AudioFile
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
Kirkus Reviews
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.
