The world of business all has their fair share of career bullshitters, and the car industry is no different. So this week’s Weekend Head Scratcher is this: Who do you think was the worst car executive ever?
Now note my wording “car executive”. This isn’t about CEO’s. Bullshitters can be found everywhere. Now before you all pile of Rick Wagoner, may I throw a couple of other suggestions out there? Roger B Smith. A guy who tried to modernize GM and ended up retarding it. “Maximum” Bob Lutz. A guy who said that making diesels 50 state compliant couldn’t be done without the use of Urea. Until VW did it without using urea. Juergen Schrempp (remember him?) The guy who orchestrated a $36 billion “Merger of equals” (that was a hoot in itself) and left it for the next guy to undo. So come on people. Who’s the worst car executive? As always, I want to hear a reasoned argument and not just random venom. This isn’t YouTube.
With so many choices, this could go on for days :)
Bob Eaton for the role (and personal wealth benefits) he played with turning over a profitable company to Mercedes to pillage.
Bob Nardelli and his idiot self. Never has one person risen so far above his level of incompetence.
We can’t forget the nearly permanent damage Jac Nassar caused at Ford.
Those are my top three!
I figured that Jacques would get mentioned near the top of this thread.
You, know, TTAC is based in the US and NA centric, but we’re growing our community around the world. It’d be interesting to hear about incompetent car execs outside the US too.
Also, remember that they’ve been building cars for over a century and there were some incompetents back then too. For all of Billy Durant’s successes, it’s hard to say that he was a good manager or executive. There were more than a few bad decisions made at the smaller car companies in the 1930s and 1950s, and in the early 1960s Chrysler replaced possibly corrupt management with Lynn Townshend, a textbook Detroit suit.
Perhaps the WCEOAT award should have categories, maybe a veterans committee like the baseball HOF has.
Speaking of HOFs, I think NASCAR made a mistake by not having a larger inaugural class, and not having separate classes for drivers, promoters, team owners and broadcasters. By only adding 5 a year and mixing all the kinds of people in the sport into one basket, it’s going to take years and years before the NASCARHOF has some kind of critical mass of the sport’s biggest names.
Yeah Billy Durant was a great salesman and pitchman (likely on a scale that would rival Buickman) but as an actual administrator/executive he didn’t know his butt from a hole in the ground. He was at the helm when the General came within a hairsbreadth of bankruptcy.
wagoner
nardelli
la neve
docherty
It’s hard to even get a remote gauge of ‘Who is the worst’ without being at least a fly on the wall during the time period. Authors and journalists will more times than not affirm public stereotypes instead of delving deeper into the true nature and talents of the executive.
I would say from a purely ‘management strategy’ standpoint that Roger Smith was likely the worst executive of the modern era.
His restructuring of GM was an unqualified failure. The purchase of Hughes and EDS had very limited impact on GM’s core products. Technology appeared to take precedence over lean production methods throughout his tenure… and there was far too much parts sharing and design similarities for GM’s product line.
Within two years of his departure GM was sinking fast into the black hole of insolvency. But on the flip side he did create Saturn which had all the makings of a successful brand during it’s first few years of it’s release. His handling of the UAW was arguably better than what Ford or Chrysler achieved during that time. Plus, he saw that GM’s cost structure was woefully uncompetitive and fought pretty damn hard to eliminate the fiefdom mentality that pervaded the organization. Unfortunately it was not near good enough.
Completely agree with Roger Smith.
Roger Smith, you hit the nail on the head.
Roger doesn’t even come close to the carnage wreaked upon GM by the Rickster.
I’ll go with Roger Smith, for so many reasons that’ll take too long to list.
OK…….I’ll list one. Market share under his watch went from the high 40’s to the low 30’s in nine short years.
(1) Henry Ford II, the capricious, arbitrary egomaniac who threw away Lee Iacocca.
(2) GM’s optics-oriented “leadership” team (Ed Whitacre et al), who delcared themselves bankrupt when they boosted Susan Docherty up the ladder and into the public eye. Then they remembered that it would be helpful to have some credibility when it came time to sell an IPO for a complex, global corporation in a highly competitive industry, and lurched in another direction.
Henry I nearly bankrupted the company.
(Edsel I died too soon, but maybe he would have been the exception.)
Henry II nearly bankrupted the company.
(The champion of Merkur, Edsel II, was a bullet the Company dodged on the car-side of the business, but didn’t FMCC have some big recapitalizations to do, like 600-700M USD worth due to bad investment and market strategies from his time.)
Billy nearly bankrupted the company.
The concept that The Family provides stability that non-family-owned companies don’t have, is a meme that is ripe for study and refutation.
Robert,
The counter argument is that the Ford family knows that the company has almost gone broke more than once so perhaps they’re more prepared to face that possibility. Perhaps the operant word in your comment is “nearly”. FoMoCo has nearly gone out of business a few times. I’m reading Prof. Charles Hyde’s history of the Dodge brothers and he makes the point that when the Dodge’s took on the contract in 1903 to supply the young FoMoCo with essentially finished cars except for bodies, seats, tires and wheels, it was considered a risky move. They had to abandon work for R.E. Olds, and at the time Henry Ford was considered a two-time loser in the early auto business, his earlier attempts failing (well, sort of, after he lost control of one of his ventures, his creditors brought in Henry Leland who turned it into Cadillac).
Hank the Deuce wasn’t a complete failure. When HF bought out James Couzens, the Dodges and his other early stockholders, he kept 49% for himself, gave Edsel 48%, and Mrs. Ford got 3%. After Edsel died and senile Henry reasserted managing control of the company, Clara and Eleanor Ford (Edsel’s widow) threatened Henry with selling the 51% of the company they owned. Apparently it was the first time in their marriage that Clara stood up to Henry. Faced with the threat, Henry relinquished control of Ford Motor Co. to his grandson, Henry Ford II. HFII was given an early discharge from the US military, and he brought in the so-called “whiz-kids”, who modernized Henry Ford’s feudal fiefdom, and introduced what is considered to be the first postwar car design, the 1949 Ford.
While FoMoCo made plenty of mistakes while the Deuce was chairman, you can find plenty of successful designs and products that Ford made between 1945 and the 1970s when HFII stepped down.
Robert Eaton. By the end of the Iacocca era, Chrysler was on a roll. A long string of hit products, Substantial increases in market share. Systems were in place that resulted in nimble product planning that, in turn, resulted in desirable products. It was the most profitable car manufacturer in the country, if not in the world.
Because Iacocca desired to prevent Lutz from assuming the top spot, Robert Eaton was chosen to come over from GM to run Chrysler. Once Eaton took charge, the situation went from bad (nickel and dime cost cutting that reversed several recent quality gains) to worse (an almost panicked approach that required any deal with any bigger company). Eaton became the ying to Juergen Schrempp’s yang in the “merger of equals” that resulted in the dismantling and near ruin of Chrysler.
Daimler Benz may have nearly killed Chrysler, but it was Eaton who gave the company away to them in the first place.
Honorable mention goes to Robert Nardelli. No background in the auto industry, and thought that he could cost-cut his way to temporary success. In his defense, however, he inherited a company in tatters, and was playing out of his league from the beginning. He was an average executive thrust into a situation that required someone of extraordinary talent.
John DeLorean for trying to finance a failing car company with a cocaine and money laundering scheme. Yes, he proved in court it was a government set-up. But still — even considering it a possibility moves John D. to the top of the list.
I won’t call DeLorean the worst. Most in-over-his-head yes, not necessarily worst, however.
Eaton–most amoral.
Roger Smith–most clueless.
Schrempp: Fokker Aircraft, AEG, Mitsubishi, Chrysler, nearly Daimler. IIRC under his watchful eye and guiding hand, Daimler-Benz burned off more than 60G USD for nothing. Need we say more?
Ironically Schrempp was one of the few (or even only) CEOs with an engineering degree. Typically his level of incompetence requires an MBA or a law degree.
First runner-up to Schremp would be Nardelli who grew Home Depot revenues while the shareholder value stayed flat. Got a great big $210million severance package for the effort too. GE dodged a bullet when he didn’t succeed Jack Welch.
re:Schrempp. It doesn’t take an engineering degree to have a world-sized ego.
DeLorean did a truly terrible job of launching his own company, but the cocaine deal was merely the last of a long line of beginner’s mistakes enshrouded in a strikingly large ego.
Bob Eaton and Henry Ford II? Both made quite a few good decisions, e.g., remember that Ford rebuilt the company from scratch after WWII. Henry’s fatal mistake was that he stayed too long.
Chrysler’s sale to Daimler was ill-fated, but a good argument can be made that the automaker was no longer large enough to survive on its own. Better to sell when you’re still strong, no? That’s exactly what Eaton did. Was there a better choice than Daimler at that point?
Not large enough? They were moving @3 million vehicles a year when they were taken by the Dimebag clowns! You must be joking.
Diamler/Schrempp had no record of making standard (or even cheap) automobiles. Some would even argue that they didn’t really have an unblemished record of making expensive automobiles. How could one expect that they could run Chrysler (a mass-producer) profitably?
I personally think that smaller automakers can be viable. But the industry chatting class has always tended toward “get bigger or get out” arguments. Eaton may have been wrong to sell, but he was following conventional wisdom.
Yes, Daimler trashed the place. But if Chrysler management was committed to selling, who else would have made more sense at the time? That’s an honest question.
One of my most prized automotive possessions is a circular gold keychain distributed throughout the Chrysler dealer network right after the Daimler sale, with “Expect the Extraordinary” cast on the back.
Like fools, we all did…
Schrempp for sure. It’s a shame what he did to not only Chrysler – but Daimler as well.
Audi and BMW are the beneficiaries of Juergan Schrempp’s reign at Daimler.
Now that you mention BMW… I know you said executives, but I think Chris Bangle’s influence on BMW design was just horrid enough for him to merit special mention in this category…
Chris Bangle is living proof that the badge on the hood can outweigh the product itself – for a short period of time, at least.
If I remember my GM history correctly, it was Smith’s predecessor, who dismantled the divisional structure at GM, allowing the company to produce Cimarrons, and other such abominations.
It was Smith who started GM’s shift from what it had been to what it became. If you want to track the bankruptcy of GM, he’s the starting point.
So many names and so little time, 1. Bob Eaton – Without doubt number one with a bullit.
2. Bob Nardelli – Lost before he even began.
3. Roger Smith – Did more to destroy GM than any other
before or after him.
4. Jac Nassar – Turned Ford Taurus from number one in
class, to “rental car” status.
5. Henry Ford ll – Dumb prick.
6. Rick Wagner – Too nice a guy for the job, makes him
second worst at GM.
7. Lee Iaccoca – For ruining all his great work at Chrysler
by hiring Eaton instead of naming the
FAR better choice of Bob Lutz as his
successor.
8. Many more to list but the ones above were first to come
to mind
A very appropriate description of what became of the Taurus during the Jac Nassar era at Ford. However, it wasn’t the only North American Ford to languish during his era of cost cutting and over-reach.
While he increased Ford’s short term profitability, the cost cutting measures and his abrasive management style would be his undoing. He looked pretty uncomfortable during the Firestone/Explore hearings.
The list goes on from this era. For example, the AXOD-E trans-axle failures in the Taurus and Windstar – The residual effects of his cost cutting would show up in the North American Focus and Escape – which are two vehicles that I’ll give him credit for – but both launches were fraught with recalls.
I agree with your list.Though, I would have put Smith and Wagner in number one and two.
Jill Lajdziak
Jac Nassar & Bob Nardelli – Jac for introducing decent cars and then turning off the lights in the engineering department till the model name had been driven into the ground. Bob Nardelli cause I worked for Home Depot at one point and I can’t name one success from ANY executive position the guy ever had.
I’ll go with Nasser. Starved all of the U.S. brands of car product by focusing exclusively on trucks and PAG. As mentioned above, left the Taurus as a virtually fleet-only product. Wasted gobs of money buying Land Rover and Volvo, and plowing gobs more into Jaguar rather than pulling the plug. Left Jaguar as a recycler of 40-year-old design rather than try to bring it into the 21st century. Killed the Lincoln brand by insisting it had to have smaller engines and less content than Jaguar, turning it from a Caddy competitor into the Buick competitor it’s viewed as today. Wasted even more money buying ancillary businesses, intending to own the customer over the full life cycle of the car without recognizing that first you had to have product to bring the customers into the showroom in the first place before you can own them.
And if you want a good laugh, read the Wikipedia entry for Jac. I went there to check some dates, and the thing reads like it was written by his PR staff.
Bob Eaton who alledgedly made over $200 million personally in the “merger of equals”, and who is now sunning his fat a$$ in some humongous mansion in Florida, while thanks to hiss folly, Chrysler almost died.
Nardelli was by far the most incompetent, but he wasn’t around long enough to do the kind of major harm people like Roger Smith, Bob Eaton and Jac Nasser inflicted on GM, Chrysler and Ford.
Without Eaton there would have never been a Nardelli.
Cammy: I think you can name a few from the UK who helped destroy the industry, can you not ? Who were the great thinkers at British Leyland ? MG-Rover-BMW ? Any insight you can give ?
There must be British decision makers of the Smith/Wagoner/Nardelli variety. And they should live in equal infamy. It would give TTAC readers an education if they aren’t familiar with the British automobile industry. The UK industry was the 2nd largest in size at one point.
Would love to hear your take on it.
I disagree with the American choices – GM, Chrylser were and still are one-trick ponies. They go into cycles of near bankruptcy, following by one or two vehicles (often under-engineered) that pulls them through, sometimes out of just sheer luck. They are characterized by a string of poor managers.
From a decidedly British perspective, I would have to place the management of Rover as the worst executive(s). BL and the various incarnations has so many bad executives who made poor choices. You could say that Berndard Pischetsrieder who nearly destroyed BMW and did destroy Rover (although things turned out good for BMW after all with the MINI and the sale of Land Rover).
The most despicable executive has to be John Towers though of the Phoenix Consortium – lies, pillage to ensure personal wealth – the man walked away with millions of pounds after the collapse of Rover.
As a footnote though, one wonders whether , regardless of management, British Leyland, BMC, etc. was salvagable – with that kind of workforce, no manufacturer could survive.
As a Chrysler ‘fanboy’, my top pick would be Robert Eaton, followed by Lee Iaccoca, followed by Roger Smith. Eaton, who in his puppy-like willingness to ‘follow the crowd’, placed Chrysler in its (very) precarious position currently. Lee Iaccoca, who couldn’t let go of his ego long enough to look at the long term health of the company he was directly responsible for. A better example of totally selfish behavior I have never seen. And a more clueless CEO than Roger Smith has yet to be seen. Here is a man that took one of the ‘WORLDS’ largest and best manufacturing corporations, and reduced it to a shadow of what it was, and could have been. Not without help, but still the real beginning of the end for GM.
Wagoner and putz most certainly top the list. Both these villains made GM virtually incapable of engineering a car from the ground up in the US.
Eaton is among the lowest of the low. He is the reason why Chrysler went from a world leader to an industry laughing stock. He is a man without a soul. Only a donkey rapist is more loathsome than Eaton.
Roger Smith at least tried to improve GM. He modernized GM’s factories and put them on the road to recovery. Wagoner and Putz or course ruined most of this by ditching Saturn. Wagoneer will be remembered for taking GM under a 20% market share, which I thought was impossible during my lifetime.
Roger Smith was never fired by the president.
What an f**king disgrace the US auto industry has become. BTW, the cruze is a pile of excrement.
Easy. Ron Zarrella.
http://www.forbes.com/2001/11/13/1113flint.html
Zarella then worked more magic:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Uwv8BKG8TngJ:www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news/2008/112_0809_hummer_sale_family_zero_engine/index.html+ron+z+gm+bausch&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Agreed.
Ron Zarrella, a guy who thought GM could build and sell cars the same way that Rolex creates and sells horrendously marked up watches that keep so-so time.
Living proof that being hired in an executive position by GM has nothing to do with competency.
Ron Zarrella who got his a$$ kicked all the way back to Bausch & Lomb, where he lied about having an MBA and sailed their good name into the toilet. B&L’s ReNu contact lens product was found by the CDC to have created potentially blinding eye infections in its users.
I’ll take Worst Car Executives for $200 Alex. What is Ron Zarrella?
How about Dieter Zetsche, for trashing Chrysler and cheapening MB?
Mercedes quality has improved with renewed focus on quality, and the E-class is built to old Mercedes standards. As for Chrysler, it was always a pile of cr**.
I agree with pretty much everyone, all the canidates are pretty awful but my personal favorite is Lutz. He became a blowhard self-glorifying pr machine who was excused from any resposibility because the writers following the business liked him and he was a constant source of quotes for them. I’m suprised no one mentioned Fritz Henderson too. He along with most of GM’s upper management was a perfect example of mediocracy rising to the top over the corpses of the truly talented who were destroyed by GM’s culture.
An honorable mention goes to Chris Bangle, the man who ruined BMW. Bangle was the perfect faux-intellectual master of bullshit. He was a master of the emperor has new clothes act, a pretenious claim that if you didn’t follow and love his designs it was because you were too stupid to understand just how great they were.
For the 7-series alone, Bangle fully deserves to have whatever’s handy thrown in his direction at every opportunity… though the sad truth is that BMW sales really skyrocketed in his time there.
From my part of the world..
Demel. Demet???Schmitt ran VW do Brasil into the ground and then Fiat stupidly hired him to run Europe. And launch Stilo, big flop after Bravo/Brava successs.
The American Ford Prez who approved Ford joining up with VW in Brazil. Yikes! Stupid! Ford never recovered!
Thw whole GM do Brasil for the last 10 years. After almost getting first place with (in line w/Europe Astra, Corsa and Vectra, not to mention thouroughly modern S10 and Silverado, let all of that go. “created” the Celta, a cheapened up 2nd generation Corsa, that though sells well, turns off many of its buyers from GM forever. Whoever made the decision to brand the new European Astra as Vectra. The ones who are forcing GM do Brazil from Opel’s puppet to a Daewoo puppet. Fail! Fail! Fail! Ridiculous.
All Renault and Peugeot people in Brazil have been incredibly incompetent.
Sigh! Sorry can’t remeber to many names. But I guess in Brazil its more like a “team” effort to do bad.
PS. And Fiat goes laughing all the way to bank!
I agree with your view on GM. The Argentinian guy running GM do Brasil when I was there was just terrible!!! He accelerated the path of destruction of GM’s image in Brazil. I remember one of his decisions (probably in line with stupid US headquarters ones): GM had to have XX% marketshare no mater what. That was it. No other business metrics were really important. Managers found an easy solution: heavy discounts.
I also agree that probably the worst of them all was the Autolatina (VW+Ford) decision maker. All but killed Ford in Brazil.
Henry Ford 1st. An absolute bastard who shafted everybody around him , family or not.
I’m going to go with Susan Docherty.
_____
The ads:
HUMMER: Get your girl on
Buick: Take a look at me now
-Allowed “Pontiac is CAR” slogan to continue from Jan 2008 to the end of Pontiac.
-Kept up the stupid “Introducing the First ever G3/G6/G8” line.
________________________________________
Some Classic Docherty quotes:
-”The plan for GMC is to continue with our Engineering Excellence driven by our “Professional Grade” positioning.”
-”At some point the LaCrosse will become our largest model and assume the mantle as our flagship.”
– “In terms of GMC’s styling what comes thundering through is tailored toughness, passionate craftsmanship along with muscular shapes and refined details such as chrome accents.”
-”Yes we do plan to market to our existing Envoy owners, we think the Terrain will be a great next vehicle for them…we’d call it upsizing in terms of fuel economy, features (like standard rear viewing camera), USB port, and the programmable power lift gate, and multi flex seating, plus 32MPG highway rated.”
The unknown executive at Porsche who greenlighted the idea of manipulating VW stock, destroying the trust of the banks that every manufacturer depends on for credit.
Everyone here knows the end of this story. Unable to cover their obligations, one of the oldest independant manufactures was forced to surrender to VW.
Already we’re hearing the words ‘platform sharing.’ I’m sure that massaging the lineup to place them between other VW brands lies in the future. “Porsche: The Poor Man’s Bugatti.”
There are several things I never cared for at Porsche. But when Cammy Corrigan did the thought experiment about choosing a set of car companies, they leapt to mind instantly.
Roger Smith. The man who TRULY killed GM. My late father (retired Chevy dealer) hated his guts, swore to his dying day that “what that guy has done will eventually kill GM.”
Didn’t Roger Smith bring Saturn to light..
As well as work with NUMMI?
WTF Happened to make him such a #)*@@)@?
For one, Saturn never should have happened. GM needed to fix its problems, not ignore them whilst spending billions trying to develop yet another brand.
Hands down Roger Smith! It look him only 7 or 8 years to completely destroy GM’s brilliant market segmentation that had been in place since the ’30’s.
Yes of course it was Roger Smith, I’d have to agree.
But that market segmentation, the car for every purpose and purse, the keep the customer in the fold with Chevy as a youngsetr starting out and taking him through to the pinnacle: Cadillac via step up brands like Pontiac Olds and Buick, started in 1961. At that time every one but Cadillac got a compact .
Then 65 when GM really started it’s consolidation of it’s divisions with the GM Assembly Div. [IIRC] to fight a regular threat of break up by the federal government for anti trust violations and for being “too big”.
Another jumping off point: the NOVA compacts [Nova Omega, Ventura II and Apollo ]. And as well documented here on TTAC: the 71 Cadillac as a symobol of the beginning of that brand’s decline.
All of this rot was well in place before Roger Smith took gasoline and torch to GM. Throw in the Olds/Chevy engine swap embarassment. Add the corporate sharing of more clones like the Monza, Skyhawk, Sunbird and Starfire and you have a decline that was gathering momentum throughout the 70s, well before Smith.
Not to discount his ineptitude and the folly of allowing Smith and his bloated ego to live out that Walter Mitty dream of creating his own car company, but the fool had a solid foundation on which to build his vision of the new GM.
Don’t know which was sadder: GM’s BK or watching some purple faced little bean counter on a powertrip singlehandedly destroy the company with each successive “great idea”. Wretched little man.
Donald Stokes (British Leyland) and George Harriman (BMC/Austin-Morris) where in charge while the British auto industry self-destructed. They both well deserve consideration for this award.
Had Roger Smith not modernized GM’s plants (though the business deal with Fanuc may not have been wise), they may have gone out of business earlier.
I think, though, that Henry Ford deserves the award. He continued building the same Model T in the 1920s, despite losing market share to Chevrolet and others, selling an obsolete car, and refusing to update it. In 1926, when Henry got wind of Edsel’s slightly restyled T, he physically attacked the prototype. Henry was convinced that the Model T was the perfect car and perfection doesn’t need updates or replacements. Finally persuaded to replace the T, Henry shut down production for six months switching over to the Model A, costing many millions in revenue.
Ford also refused to use modern business management, particularly accounting practices. He had no need of accountants and ran his company like a feudal empire.
He had tons of crackpot ideas, some that proved to work, others that were just nuts. He was all about production. The $5/day wage in 1913 came about because he had a 90+% turnover rate on new hires. His factories were terrible places to work with workers being timed by stopwatches and considerable danger. To keep trained and experienced employees, Ford had to pay them more money. He also provided health care services, and there was a department to place workers injured on the job in tasks they could still perform. Henry hadn’t figured out that making his plants safe would have also improved productivity.
He hired amed Jewish architect Albert Kahn to design his factories, and blacks by the thousands to work in them, but he was racist Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard’s biggest patron, and his anti-semitism painted a stain on the company’s image that had faded but is still notable enough that Ford NA Pres. Mark Fields and Ford VP and Treasurer Neil Schloss, get asked about being Jewish executives at Ford.
Henry reasserted control of FoMoCo when Edsel died, in the middle of WWII. Panicked that a major supplier to the war effort was being run by a senile lunatic that wanted to reintroduce the Model T, the FDR administration arranged to discharge Henry Ford II early so he could run Ford.
Also in his personal life, Henry Ford was a huge hypocrite. He had his hired thug, Harry Bennett spy on Ford employees, lest their personal lives run afoul of Ford’s moral standards. Meanwhile, Henry had a large home built upstream on the Rouge River from his and Clara’s estate at Fairlane. In that home lived Evangeline Cote Dahlinger with her husband, a Ford manager who traveled quite a bit on Henry’s behalf. Evangeline joined FoMoCo as a stenographer and was very pretty. According to Richard Bak’s Henry and Edsel , Henry would take the electric runabout boat that he had made for Clara (she didn’t like gasoline engines, and also had a Detroit Electric car), up the Rouge where he’d dock at the back of the Dahlinger estate. A secret staircase led directly to Mrs. Dahlinger’s boudoir. Sometimes Evangeline’s son would play with the Ford grandchildren.
I can’t remember what title Mr. Dahlinger held. He scouted out locations for Ford factories around the world. I think that today we’d call him a beard.
So the old coot gets my vote. Henry Ford was the worst car executive of all times.
Well, either him or Ferdinand Porsche (for stealing others’ ideas and for working for the Godwin comment provoking guy).
While the Fords (Henrys I and II) are definitely in the running for worst auto exec, I tend to give them a pass for the simple reason that they created/owned the company. None of the other auto execs mentioned can make that claim. They all walked with huge bonuses for their poor decisions which caused the stockholders of the companies they worked for dearly.
Speaking of which, to the defenders of Roger Smith, it’s worth noting that although he wasn’t at the helm at the time, he was definitely in a leadership position during the years that preceded his ascent to the top position at GM. That means that he surely had a hand in the decisions that began GM’s long slide in quality (i.e, the seventies), beginning with the outrageously craptacular Vega and Citation.
Likewise, Smith might not have begun the process of ‘badge-engineering’ GM’s divisions to the point where they were virtually identical, but he certainly accelerated it, culminating with the Cavalier-based Cadillac Cimarron, a vehicle that has Roger Smith written all over it.
I remember a GM magazine ad from the sixties that had a photo of all the division’s musclecars side-by-side. Compare this with the famous eighties’ Ford tv commercial where a restaurant parking valet can’t find the GM cars for customers because they all look alike, while the Lincoln owner has no such problem.
The bottom line is that Smith took over GM when it was already in decline, but instead of leading the company up, he just sped up its demise.
Sorry folks, Smith were not that bad. It was Wagoner that was fired by a sitting US president. The putz soon followed. What really has helped Roger Smith reputation was that he was followed a few decades later by Wagoner, who beat Smith’s market share loss record, and at the same time completely destroyed the company’s ability to engineer and design anything significant in the US. To top that off he also foolishly bought fiat and let Delphi fall into bankruptcy. It was Wagoner and Putz who bankrupted GM not Roger Smith. Smith’s reputation has now been somewhat repaired.
Bangle is probably one of the most influential designers of the decade. How many other car companies copied his designs?
Roger Smith would seem to be the traditional favorite for the title, mainly due to the simple magnitude of what he’d done. But it needs to be mentioned that Smith had over ten years to truly foul things up at GM.
No, my vote for the worst auto exec has to go to William C. Newberg. Newberg was only president of Chrysler for a mere 64 days from April thru June, 1960 (before being fired for malfeasance), but during that time, he attended a Detroit garden party where he overheard then Chevrolet GM Ed Cole mention a new, downsized car to be released in 1962.
Cole was talking about the Chevy II Nova. Newberg, in what has to be one of the most colossal blunders in automotive history, mistakenly thought Cole was talking about Chevorlet’s full-size models. In full panic mode, Newberg rushed back to Chrysler and ordered the designers back to the drawing board to completely redesign and shrink the 1962 Mopar full-size cars, which were already near completion. The enormous cost of this undertaking, along with the cars themselves being sales bombs, resulted in an unmitigated disaster that nearly put the company out of business.
The truly sad thing about the wretched 1962 full-size Mopars is that when they were released and it quickly became apparent what a disaster they were, by that time Newberg was long gone. So, the scapegoat became Chrysler’s head of design, Virgil Exner, who was quickly replaced by Elwood Engel.
Exner had done the best he could in the time he was given (the 1962 cars were based largely on the 1960 Valiant, and they looked for all the world like a stretched version of it) so he really didn’t deserve the blame.
For the US, Eaton did the most damage. He had a company that had developed an American version of the Japaense system of sharing development costs with suppliers, and he merged it with a top-down German company. It took a string of screwups to take down GM. Ford didn’t have the string of dreadful leaders that GM had, with Iacocca, Caldwell and Peterson doing a decent job for two decades. Some of the others mentioned really didn’t stay long enough, but one, Lynn Townsend, spent years at Chrysler, and nearly killed it the first time, and should be mentioned.
For Europe, nothing can match what Juergen Schrempp did. He not only screwed up both Daimler AND Chrysler, he brought down two famous aircraft manufacturers, Fokker and Messerschmitt while runningDaimler’s aerospace division, costing Daimler billions. Between that and the Chrysler merger, he probably cost Daimler $50 billion in losses over about 15 years.
Most Americans don’t know much of what was going on in the UK, with the exception of damning whoever was running Lucas Electrical from the ’60s to ’80s. There may be no one individual to blame for British Leyland, since the government was involved and decisions were apparently made by politicians and committees.
Going back to the dawn of the motoring industry, how about Harry Lawson?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_John_Lawson
Or for that matter Edward Pennington? (Though it may be a stretch to call him a “car executive”)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Pennington
I’m sure in those early days there were countless scoundrels preying on the unwary.
Roger Smith – he gave away market share he could have increased in the early Eighties when the Yen started appreciating. Had he kept prices level, GM would have had a price advantage and increased its share; instead, he traded share for one-time quarterly profits. He also presided over the increase retirement benefits in lieu of increases in current union wage, a prime cause of the bankruptcy. CEOs are supposed to have long-term views and he didn’t, demonstrably.
There have been so many terrible CEOs at GM that picking the worst one is virtually impossible-but I’ll go with Roger Smith-he poured vast amounts of money into projects which failed. Like the big car-small car divisional structure which actually increased the amount of bureaucracy at GM; the Saturn division which likewise consumed vast amounts of GM resources and resulted in less than stellar vehicles. He poured vast amounts into automation with dismal results to show(like the story I read about robots painting each other). Not to mention cookie cutter styling and reckless model proliferation.
Bob Eaton for his role in turning Chrysler over to Mercedes for it to pillage and burn. Bob Nardelli for his total incompetence in everything., Somehow he was able to move beyond his level of incompetence.
Jac Nassar for the damage he created at Ford, after good management by Caldwell and Peterson, he nearly destroyed Ford.
All worthy names. I do agree with Roger Smith.
But my nomination would be the collection of GM idiots who thought it was a good idea to make and sell the Pontiac Aztek.
I don’t know enough to nominate someone, but feel fairly safe in saying I’m sure most if not all of these incompetent fools made millions even in their worst years. I wish an exec in the auto industry – doesn’t look like you need any qualifications.
Personal fave: Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriotura. The guy who did a General Sherman on GM’s supplier relationships, then would up costing his next employer (VW) a cool billion for theft of GM trade secrets. This does raise the interesting question of exactly which self-immolating practice Lopez stole? Because I can’t think of anything GM was doing in the 90’s that had any positive business value whatsoever. Especially not the simultaneous destruction of supplier quality and financial stability that Lopez perfected under the General’s watch.
I find it difficult to single out Roger Smith – he was just the culmination of several bad CEO’s, CFO’s and Boards of Governors.
I believe that the downfall of GM began at some point in the late 1950’s when the focus of the Board of Governors became the short term view of share value – it was a downward spiral from that point on.
I also don’t fault Robert Eaton – at the time the merger was thought of as the only way to ensure the long term survival of Chrysler.
I nominate James Nance, president of Packard Motors, who went into a merger with Studebaker without doing any due diligence whatsoever – he took Studebaker’s claims of profitability at face value.
I’d forgotten about Nance’s ill-advised decision which virtually doomed Packard. If not for the merger (which surely wouldn’t have happened had Nance actually researched Studebaker’s financial woes), it likely would have been Packard (and not Studebaker) that survived into the sixties.
OTOH, Bob Eaton’s Chrysler merger with Daimler (or even Iacocca’s Jeep merger with Chrysler) doesn’t seem that dissimmiliar. In that regard, although the resulting merger was poor for the company that was in the better financial position, neither merger was nearly as disasterous (and in a shorter period of time) as Nance’s acquisition of Studebaker. Packard had more money than Studebaker, Nance took over Studebaker in 1954, and within four years, Packard was gone, while Studebaker continued building cars until 1966.
It’s worth noting that after he left Packard in 1956, Nance went to Ford where he was put in charge of (of all things) the Edsel.
wiping out $80,000,000,000 in market cap takes the cake for Red Ink Rick.
The guys who greenlighted the dull and superfluous Austin 3-liter are my personal fauvorites:
http://www.aronline.co.uk/index.htm?ado61storyf.htm
The guys who greenlighted the Citröen SM and the Citröen Wankel engines program also deserve a mention. After all they bankrupted Citröen, but at least they bankrupted the company with adventurous and exciting ideas.
As I said before getting fired by a US president automatically makes you the worse CEO. There is no argument here.
I’d go for Katsuaki Watanabe, he took over Toyota at it’s absolute peak, then proceeded to make their cars even blander than they were before. On top of this, he oversaw a noticeable drop in quality of the products, quality being the only reason people bought boring Toyotas, a very dangerous path indeed. He also lay the ground for the first annual loss for Toyota in 50 years, and i suspect that even though thay are back in black now, the legacy will be felt for many years, and they may be overtaken by Volkswagen as the biggest manufacturer in the next 2 years.
Anyone German.
Lynn Meyers-Pontiac-under her “leadership” the downward spiral of mediocrity was accelerated.
Karen Fisher-Olds-one of ‘moz’-Zarella’s whiz kids.
Bob Kraut-Pontiac-singlehandedly destroyed the lauch of the 2004 GTO.
I definitely second Jose Ignacio Lopez – his cost cutting practically did Opel in – it never recovered from his efforts.
On top of that I would mention Curtice at GM, who managed to pervert Sloane’s sound system of management and led to all the following GM top management candidates, as well as to the general decontenting and engineering stagnation at the company (not that the engineers themselves were at all bad).
In this context one can also blame De Lorean and Bunkie Knudsen for the GTO – the car that convincingly demonstrated to the Detroit management that more money could be made in the short run with appearance than with genuine progress. This effectively left the door on several segments open to the Asian import brands – profits were slim there so the only solutions considered were to stay away or put together a poorly thought out and even more poorly executed product, which had no chance of competing in the long run.
The person at GM who decided that division executives have to drive their own products also deserves an honorable mention – this more than anything else destroyed the brand differentiation – the Chevy top dogs certainly did not want their Caprice’s to lag much behind a contemporary Caddy.
Tie between Roger Smith and Henry Ford.
With Malcom Bricklin off the chart….