As disheartening as it is to admit this, the most successful post I ever published on LinkedIn took all of about ten seconds of my time and provided no value-added insight or perspective. It was a photo my Michigan friend Allan had shared with me of veteran auto journalist Doron Levin standing with a distinguished elderly man. I immediately recognized Doron, but I was unaware of the person he was with.
“Who’s the guy with Doron?” I emailed Allan.
“Bob Lutz.”
Having never worked as an auto journalist and never really had much interest in the industry, I was only mildly familiar with Lutz, except that his name was often preceded by the adjective “legendary.” My photo of Levin and Lutz generated 65,607 impressions, 782 endorsements, and 83 comments, all of them favorable. What struck me about the comments were the repeated admiring references to Lutz’s leadership from executives who themselves had impressive credentials.
A representative comment: “Learned more about the auto industry from working with Bob Lutz than any other experience in my 50-year career,” posted Robert C. “Bob” Purcell, president of a Michigan-based boutique automotive consulting group.
Michael Peterson, an engineer and founder of Raise a Hood, which aims to revolutionize automotive repair, posted this comment: “Bob Lutz’s book ‘Car Guys vs. Bean Counters’ is still one of my favorite reads.”
That Peterson was still hailing a book published well over a decade ago piqued my interest, and I ordered a copy on Amazon.
It was far and away the best book on leadership I’ve ever read, one of those books you don’t want to finish because you feel so connected to the author and his wisdom. I can’t do justice to “Car Guys” and recount even a fraction of all the knowledge Lutz dispensed, except to say the book is as relevant today as when it was first published.
“Car Guys” was Lutz’s memoir about his years at GM after he was lured to the automaker following successful stints at Ford, Chrysler, and BMW. He was in his 70s at the time. The book’s dedication signals that readers are going to be treated to unsparing insights about all that ailed the auto industry in Lutz’s day:
This book is dedicated to the hardworking men and women, at all levels, hourly and salaried, in the domestic U.S. automobile industry. The problems, mostly, were not your fault!
That final sentence captures one of the book’s central themes. Lutz never believed GM lacked talented engineers, designers, or factory workers. He believed they had been trapped inside a management system that rewarded caution over creativity, administrative compliance over judgment, and spreadsheets over products.
Lutz’s ultimate targets were the finance folks, or as he preferred to call them, the bean counters.
He begins his preface with a story about how, when he was head of Ford Europe, he approved some modest expenditures to improve Ford’s UK-built four-cylinder engines, which were wearing out at an unacceptable rate.
“The finance guys piped up and informed me that I had, by my hasty decision, just blown a roughly $50 million hole in the profit forecast. It seems that was the amount of profit the Parts and Service organization was reaping by shipping an endless stream of shoddy, soft camshafts to hundreds of thousands of customers who ‘had no other choice . . . they’ve got to buy them.’”
“Yes, they had no choice . . . until their next vehicle purchase.”
Lutz shared that his career at Ford suffered because of such decisions, earning him a reputation as “a good product guy, but he’s not bottom-line focused, not a sound businessman.”
Lutz was an unabashed “car guy,” and he passionately believed the auto industry was fundamentally a business of emotional desire, not rational analysis.
The critical error of the bean-counter mentality was treating cars like commodities, designing them by committee and focus group to satisfy a checklist of specifications while stripping away anything that might alienate a buyer. The result, Lutz argued, was a sterile, generic appliance that nobody actively hated but nobody eagerly bought either.
In a market where mechanical reliability is merely the price of entry, Lutz argued that visual passion and distinctive character are what create demand, pricing power, and long-term profitability. Finance mattered, but its proper role was to support the creation of great products, not dictate what those products should become.
When Lutz arrived at General Motors in 2001, he was shocked to discover that GM’s own designers openly hated the cars they were creating. In a candid early meeting with Vice President of Design Wayne Cherry, Lutz criticized a series of uninspiring future styling proposals, only for Cherry to admit that he despised them too.
The problem was not a lack of talent in the styling studios. It was a corporate structure that had stripped designers of authority.
The real power resided with the Vehicle Line Executives, or VLEs, MBA-trained controllers and brand managers tasked with keeping programs on time and under budget. The VLEs viewed cars largely as financial packages, dictating the hard engineering points and carryover parts before handing the result to Design with orders to simply “wrap sheet metal around it.”
If a designer tried to introduce a bold, emotional curve that added a few dollars to manufacturing costs or threatened a timeline, the VLEs killed it.
Lutz recognized that this process was systematically “blanderizing” GM’s lineup. One of his first executive moves was to strip the VLEs of their veto power over aesthetics and elevate the design studio. By giving designers direct authority over proportions, stance, and styling, and making them answerable to product leaders rather than budget controllers, Lutz liberated GM’s creative talent, laying the groundwork for visually striking turnarounds like the Pontiac Solstice and Cadillac CTS.
Lutz didn’t rescue GM’s design culture by importing a better group of designers. He trusted the talented people GM already had and gave them the authority and direction they needed to succeed.
That distinction is important. Lutz was unsparing in his criticism of GM’s products and processes, but he didn’t conclude that the company’s people were incapable. He believed the opposite. He saw an organization overflowing with talent that had been smothered by layers of management, fear of failure, and executives who cared more about avoiding mistakes than creating something memorable.
Lutz was a tough and demanding boss, yet he was willing to tolerate some brazen insubordination to achieve his goals.
He recounted an incident at GM’s Milford Proving Ground northwest of Detroit when he mercilessly trashed the fit and finish of GM’s vehicles in front of the automaker’s top executives. “A truly gigantic man,” at least six-foot-five and 240 pounds of muscle, named Joe Spielman planted himself before the six-foot-two-and-a-half Lutz, grabbed him by the lapels of his suit, and raised him onto his toes.
“Okay, I think I’ve heard about as much of this shit as I want to,” said Spielman, who oversaw GM’s sheet metal division and was wearing a Harley-Davidson leather jacket. “YOU are going to take ME to the car you think is best, and we’re going to focus on that one.”
Lutz showed Spielman a Hyundai Sonata.
“You want sharp ‘bird beaks’ like that?”
Yes.
Next, the doors.
“You want flushness and gaps and parallelism like this?”
Yes.
“You want moldings to align like these here?”
Yes.
“You want . . . you want.”
Yes, yes.
“Okay, I got the goddamn picture. Guys?” Spielman said, calling his subordinates. “See this car? That’s our new standard for sheet metal. I want you all to remember what you are seeing. Measure it out and take pictures.”
Lutz was skeptical, but Spielman rose to the occasion, greatly improving the build of existing cars as well as new vehicles to what Lutz described as “world-class perfection.”
Rather than punish Spielman for physically confronting and publicly challenging him, Lutz gave him the opportunity to prove he could deliver. Spielman did.
The story reveals something more important than Lutz’s tolerance for colorful characters. He respected people who cared deeply about their work, even when their passion was expressed in ways that would terrify a modern human-resources department. What mattered was whether they could produce results.
Despite his vice chairman title and legendary status, Lutz was famous for bypassing executive suites to engage directly with working-level staff. On Fridays, he routinely dropped in on engineering shops to huddle with midlevel engineers, designers, and fabrication teams, dissecting future models in granular detail.
It was a core element of his campaign to rebuild GM’s culture around product perfection rather than administrative compliance. Lutz understood that the most valuable knowledge inside a company often resided several layers below the executives making the final decisions.
His engagement with employees wasn’t performative. Former colleagues often recall receiving handwritten notes from him recognizing their work or encouraging someone after a difficult project. Despite his hard-driving reputation, Lutz understood something too many executives forget: People who feel respected and trusted almost always produce better work than people who merely feel supervised.
That helps explain why so many people who worked with Lutz still speak about him with affection and admiration. Plenty of executives are demanding. Plenty can frighten subordinates into meeting a deadline. Far fewer can challenge people relentlessly while leaving them feeling that their judgment, talent, and contribution genuinely matter.
Lutz resented the fawning media coverage Toyota received in his day for supposedly being more environmentally conscious than GM, a reputation the automaker garnered because of its launch of the hybrid Prius. He recalled encountering a woman at a gas station who said she bought a Toyota Sequoia instead of a Chevy Tahoe because she wanted better gas mileage.
The woman boasted that her Sequoia got 15 mpg. The Tahoe was rated at 22 mpg.
To combat GM’s public perception as environmentally irresponsible, Lutz championed the development of the Chevrolet Volt, a pioneering plug-in vehicle that quickly developed a cult following. The Volt could function as a pure electric vehicle for roughly 40 miles on a single charge before an onboard gasoline engine kicked in, acting primarily as a generator to create electricity and extend the car’s range.
Lutz explicitly referred to the Volt as a “stepping-stone to full electrics,” arguing that plug-in vehicles were necessary to bridge the gap while battery technology matured, charging infrastructure developed, and battery costs declined. Consumers, he believed, needed a familiar transition vehicle to overcome range anxiety before the market would be ready for pure battery-electric vehicles.
His position wasn’t rooted in hostility toward new technology. Lutz had championed advanced products throughout his career. What he resisted was allowing ideology, corporate fashion, or executive ambition to get ahead of customers.
That principle extends far beyond the debate over hybrids and electric vehicles. Lutz believed successful companies begin with a clear understanding of what customers want and then empower talented people to create products that exceed those expectations. They do not begin with a corporate mandate and demand that customers validate it.
That is why “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” remains so relevant. The book is not simply a defense of automobile enthusiasts or an attack on finance executives. It is a warning about what happens when companies become detached from the people who design, engineer, manufacture, sell, and buy their products.
Lutz believed companies flourish when creative people are trusted to exercise judgment. He believed leaders should immerse themselves in the details of the business rather than manage through presentations and financial abstractions. He believed disagreement, even fierce disagreement, could be constructive when everyone was committed to producing something exceptional.
Most of all, Lutz believed leadership was not about proving that everyone beneath you had failed. It was about recognizing the talent already present, removing the obstacles preventing it from succeeding, setting an uncompromising standard, and making people believe they were capable of meeting it.
Looking back at the dozens of comments beneath that LinkedIn photo, I understand them better now.
Those executives weren’t simply praising Bob Lutz because he was a legendary auto executive who helped create some memorable cars. They were remembering a leader who made talented people believe their work mattered and that, with the right direction and expectations, they were capable of accomplishing extraordinary things.
That kind of leadership is always worth remembering. Sadly, it seems to be in too short supply these days.