John Z. DeLorean’s memoir/exposé On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors is well known among auto enthusiasts and GM watchers. Many of you have probably read it at some point. I had heard it referenced since probably my teen years, but never read it. As a car buff and book reader with a keen interest in automotive history and even some in the business side of it, I somehow never got around to seeking it out. That shortcoming was finally corrected by happenstance a couple of years ago. I was browsing an antique store for nothing in particular and spied a hardback copy sitting on a small book shelf. $2.50. Sold!
I’m a little embarrassed I wasn’t more intentional in acquiring the book. Be that as it may, I’m glad I finally read it. If you haven’t, I’d recommend it as a pretty easy read that gives an interesting insider account of GM during its most dominant era.
On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors is written in the first person of DeLorean, but was actually ably written by business journalist J. Patrick Wright based on 1974-75 interviews with DeLorean after his 1973 departure from GM. DeLorean intended it to be his business memoir, but it wasn’t released until 1979 because he decided he no longer wanted to do the book. When Wright finished it, DeLorean was well along in plans to start his eponymous car company and no longer wanted to rile GM with his damning commentary. It was eventually published by Wright independently and, indeed, it can’t have made General Motors’ management very happy. The large-selling book is a scathing portrayal of GM upper management as detached, amoral, and incompetent. As with all autobiographies, one has to keep in mind it’s only the perspective of one person, who’s generally inclined to make himself look as good as possible. The reader’s job of interpreting the story is further complicated by DeLorean’s mercurial and controversial character. Some people consider him a genius and visionary with uncommon talents among auto execs, while others consider him a narcissistic sociopath talented mostly in self-promotion. And they might all be right!
Much of the fireworks in the book are in the first few chapters where DeLorean covers his decision to leave the corporation. It’s an exposé of the cloistered and often counter-productive jobs of GM upper management (a.k.a. The 14th Floor), as evidenced in the Corvair suspension debacle and other escapades which revealed an ethical disconnect on the 14th Floor that encouraged, as DeLorean puts it, “[otherwise] moral men to make immoral [business] decisions”.
Those chapters where DeLorean excoriates the system that put financial interest above morality are very interesting, especially in light of what we now know about subsequent events. DeLorean is best known to the public for ethically dubious moves he made with his DeLorean Motor Company, most infamously his arrest and apparent agreement to smuggle cocaine. Though he was acquitted of that and other financial charges, his life confirms the truth that being able to discern the flaws in others doesn’t make one immune from those same flaws. As a business book, it’s also captivating because these themes aren’t unique to General Motors. Large corporations (and the individuals therein) have at times acted immorally since there have been large corporations. A company knowingly selling products that will harm or kill some of their customers is an old, old story that’s still very current.
The bulk of the rest of the book focuses on DeLorean’s time as general manager of Chevrolet, which was his biggest professional challenge at GM and according to him, his biggest achievement. DeLorean’s GM career is best known to car nuts for his time in Pontiac, of course, as a key figure in that division’s huge successes in the 60’s (as Chief Engineer and Manager, which are covered in two chapters). When he became division Manager in 1965, he readily admits that Pontiac was already successful and stepping into the head role was therefore fairly easy. He made a number of product, manufacturing and marketing improvements, but refining an already successful operation was simple compared to the situation at Chevrolet when he was tapped to be Manager in 1969.
Though Chevy sales were still fairly strong, according to DeLorean it was an operational mess in almost every way: declining profits and market share, poor marketing, worsening product quality, horrible financial controls, and an organization unwieldy to the point of extreme dysfunction. His predecessor in the role, Pete Estes, who had so ably preceded DeLorean as Pontiac Manager, had been unable to make much improvement at Chevrolet. Several chapters recount his troubleshooting efforts and how he began to get the division back on track. Some of his methods (and his lifestyle) were unorthodox in GM and if there is one theme that comes through in the book, it’s that General Motors hated un-orthodoxy! He had many clashes with and threats from his immediate corporate superiors, but the chairman and board backed him as manager because he was able to quickly show at least a little improvement in profit and they were desperate that anyone might be able to get Chevy in order.
The Vega gets its own chapter as the only real failure of his GM tenure. Reading it is fascinating in the same way as watching a train crash. The Vega, in his telling, was a fatally flawed project from conception and most all the major decisions and design were done before he arrived in mid-1969 and assumed responsibility for rolling it out in 1970 as a ’71 model. In contrast to normal practice up to then, the Vega was a corporate project that Chevrolet division had almost no input on the engineering of. This made it an orphan at Chevrolet that nobody wanted, so DeLorean’s role was to try to motivate everyone to put in their best effort because, like it or not, it would wear the bowtie and reflect on them.
As if the car needed more problems, its launch was hobbled by a UAW strike at the start of the ’71 model year. In October 1971, at the start of the ’72 model year, control of the Lordstown Assembly plant, the joint Chevrolet-Fisher Body plant where the Vega was built, was transferred to GM Assembly Division. GMAD immediately fired 700 people, including many quality control workers, and took out the defect feedback system, leading to another UAW strike in February 1972. DeLorean mentions the Vega’s engine durability problems and the expense that caused GM, but because most of the book was actually written in 1974-75, there’s not much detail about the Vega’s subsequent history. It sold extremely well from 1972 to 1974, but sales dwindled after that, hurt by its earned reputation for poor long-term quality and new competition, including Chevy’s own Monza and the cheaper Chevette.
By 1972, Vega notwithstanding, the status of Chevrolet had been improved in almost every way and profits were up significantly. A promotion to the 14th Floor was in the offing, which DeLorean says he resisted as much as he could because he wanted to finish the turnaround at Chevrolet (some other sources say it wasn’t so much a promotion, rather that he was removed from Chevrolet and put in an out-of-the-way executive suite job due to internal investigations of possible kickbacks, though that has not been definitively established). Nevertheless, he was promoted in late 1972 to Vice President, Car and Truck Group. As he tells it, this took him out of the excitement of day-to-day operations management and into an underwhelming world of mostly useless paperwork and meetings. The paper and meetings took the time that he wanted to spend plotting out ways that GM as a corporation could improve its products and operations and plan long range product and business strategies. Though that would seem to be the natural role of a top executive, he was essentially told to stay in his lane and be a Team Player. Being a Team Player was big on the 14th Floor. It included not making other executives look bad by pointing out that the business practices of America’s largest corporation had vast room for improvement. It only took about six months for DeLorean to decide, with no disagreement at all from the company, that the 14th Floor wasn’t the place for him.
DeLorean’s account portrays GM upper management as so increasingly ossified and incompetent over his tenure from the 50’s to the 70’s, that one wonders how the company managed to be as dominant and successful as it was during this time. For us classic car enthusiasts, GM products from the 1950’s, 60’s and early 70’s are perennial favorites. It was GM’s glory days and there’s hardly a product they built in that era that doesn’t have a large fanbase today. How did they build such cool vehicles, that were generally better built and more reliable than much of their future (70s-90s) product, while being so dysfunctional behind the scenes? DeLorean has a theory for that! As he sees it, the foundation to the company’s strength lay with GM’s decentralized structure, as originally conceived under Alfred P. Sloan. Divisions had a lot of independence and were responsible for the bulk of the engineering, styling and manufacture of the cars they sold. Corporate’s job was to facilitate the divisions making the best cars they could. The decisions that most affected the actual form and quality of the cars were made close to the operations by the division, not far removed on the 14th floor. He also credits the huge amount of talented employees at GM doing the real work for the goodness of the cars, as well as GM’s dominant dealer network for keeping sales up.
In DeLorean’s telling, the more the 14th Floor tried to be involved in divisional functions, the worse the products were. This makes sense in hindsight, as by the 1980’s GM was much more centrally controlled while their products were less inspired and often lower quality. The original decentralized GM model was inherently inefficient, yet it created the framework for amazing market dominance and a legacy of great products from the 1920’s to the 70’s. According to DeLorean, there was a benign corporate (finance) vs. division (operations) tension that when well balanced, created a highly successful business with unique strengths. What made the tension work was the personality and ability of leaders like Sloan and Harlow Curtis (president 1953-58), two men that were particularly effective in his view. Over time, a culture built up that favored less dynamic, more cautious corporate leaders. The foundational structure, as effective as it was for many years, didn’t prevent a toxic culture and a growing imbalance.
That imbalance observed by DeLorean in his time was never rectified up to the 2009 bankruptcy. His criticisms in On A Clear Day are given credibility by the subsequent deadly sins and fall of GM. Still, his own later career running his eponymous auto company proved that it’s easier to throw stones than to build a glass house. Even keeping the DeLorean controversies in mind shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying this rare, well-written peek behind the curtains of old GM.
Related Reading:
Automotive History: John Z. DeLorean, The BMW Turbo And The Birth Of The DeLorean by Don Andreina
GM’s Deadly Sin #2: Chevrolet Vega – GM’s First Deadly Sin by PN
I recall reading this book not long after it came out, and then again maybe fifteen years ago. Thanks for this refresher!
John Z absolutely had a monstrous ego. But he also seems to have been one of GM’s more effective Divisional managers from that time. And I agree with his take that the GM Way of centralized administration and decentralized operations was the secret sauce that made that company so dominant for so many decades. However, the era of safety and emissions regulations probably made the old structure obsolete. It is interesting to contemplate in hindsight whether some centralized governmental compliance organization within the company might have allowed the decentralized divisional structure to continue. But that is something we will never know.
It wasn’t only the safety and emission compliance issues; GM had an archaic decentralized structure with too many divisions that was a relic of the 1920s. Yes, they managed to make that work through the 1950s and into the 1960s due to a huge momentum and market share, but it was not going to work in an era of rapid change and shrinking market share. Companies invariably have three phases: growth, consolidation and decline. GM was essentially destined to decline in a world that was becoming more globalized and with competitors that could attack it from below (VW, Japan) as well as from above (Mercedes, BMW, etc..). There was simply no way GM was going to maintain its former market share, and its decentralized divisional structure was becoming a liability. Roger Smith saw that clearly, but his execution was faulty. But centralization and consolidation and a reduced number of divisions was inevitable.
Hence JZD’s take on GM is shallow and misses the bigger picture. Of course the 14th floor was sclerotic and ineffective in a rapidly changing world, but he did not have a genuine remedy for that. He couldn’t see far enough into the future to have a genuine vision for a new GM. Which is not surprising as he just wasn’t all that visionary or brilliant. Yes, he was a bit smarter than the average suit on the 14th floor and more attuned to the current vibe on the street, but that was not going to be enough for him to have led GM where it really needed to go and it certainly wasn’t enough for him to resist an inevitably failed ego-trip (DeLorean Motors).
This was a great book, but as you mentioned, it was always tempered by what you knew about John DeLorean. How much of his comments were hindsight I don’t know, but I found myself agreeing with most of what he said. There certainly is a lot of inertia within any large entity, and once things have gone well, it’s pretty easy for it to go off the rails based on its own weight.
Nice summary, Jon.
Well said Aaron! I work for a big box auto parts chain that shall remain nameless, things have gone well for them, but it’s all too clear that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. And internet sales are slowly killing the DIY side of it.
Thank you. Keeping up that level of success in anything over the long term is always difficult. Coca-Cola has done well for 100+ years, but making and selling cars is much more complicated than sweetened, colored water.
Give GM credit for it did handle the ’73 Energy crisis very well with the revised A, B, & C body in 1977 & 78. And in the book, he does complement the GM K body (soon to be Seville).
However, would he have made the X-body any better or worse if he had stuck around? I don’t think so. The Fiat 127 had appeared by 1971 and made FWD the new norm, but little to no mention on his part; I feel his comfort zone was RWD. He may have impeded the shift that GM needed to adopt to survive in the long run.
In the long run, it was better for him to leave. He was way out of his element on the 14th floor and I don’t feel he had the ability to develop a long term, big picture strategy for GM. He may have ended up as another Roger Smith.
We could wonder what if DeLorean have a less bigger ego and what if he have leaved for Chrysler or even AMC? I doubt DeLorean would have liked to work at Ford under the order of Henry Ford II and possibly clashing with Iacocca after what happened with Bunkie Knudsen.
In that case, his career might have been more like Bob Lutz’s.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of the book was his attempt while still at Pontiac to make the full-sizer a long-bonnet version of the intermediates, on the basis of their greater efficiency. He got Pete Estes on board with the proposal, but the only models that made it through the 14th Floor were Grand Prix and Monte Carlo.
As noted by authors Ivan Fallon and James Srodes, it cost Wright about $50,000 to self-publish this book and its sales exceeded $1,000,000. Good on him for persevering.
Great review of an interesting book about a most interesting character. Rightly or wrongly most of the general public will remember DeLorean as the time traveling machine in the Back to the Future movie franchise. I doubt I would even have been aware of John DeLorean if it weren’t for all of the Car and Driver articles about him, and how even his long hair and mustache didn’t fit into the GM corporate mold.
Roger Smith did not need to write a memoir. Michael Moore did it for him. 🙂
++1
That was most definitely an UNAUTHORIZED biography!
Another book that has become a classic. Unfortunately, as Mark Train once observed, a classic is a book everybody talks about, but nobody reads, LOL! I’ll have to fix that shortcoming in my own library and get a copy to read, because it sounds like it should be a great story, much like Lee Iacocca’s biography was (which I actually did read, BTW)! Granted, Mr. DeLorean would have a lot to answer for before his passing, but that doesn’t diminish the value of his insights into what ailed, and some would argue still ails GM, myself included. The list of GM cars that had the potential to be great cars and profitable products, but failed in the marketplace, is a long and sad list. If this book tells us why that was so, maybe someone will be able to fix what is wrong with GM, but then again, maybe not. GM may too far gone to fix, as the big supertanker continues to glide out of control towards the rocks of foreign competition, building mediocre products that sell in large numbers only to fleet buyers and those who will “Buy American” no matter what!
It is a very readable book and not overly long.
I don’t think there are any specific prescriptions in the book that could easily be applied to fix GM then or now, just the general benefit that any company would get from the customer-focused and ethical management that he espouses. It is interesting to contemplate what the Vega would have been like if he had been given major influence over it from the beginning. As he goes into in the book, his vision for the car was quite different from the end product, he wanted a more premium small, sporty car, not the bargain commuter car it was. Not that it would have made much difference if the durability problems weren’t prevented. Perhaps his engineer’s mentality could have influenced the unfortunate engine choices and body compromises, among other things.
I’m skeptical of that because the person most singularly responsible for the Vega debacle was Ed Cole. After becoming senior management, Cole had continued to have Engineering Staff and Styling Staff doing all kinds of quixotic pet projects for him, some of them really quite harebrained. Cole certainly had an engineering mindset, but that became a liability once he was a couple steps removed from the people actually responsible for selling the product.
The Corvair and Vega both suffered very badly because they were engineered as premium small cars that then had to be cut to the bone because at some point, the product planning and marketing and sales people said, “My god, this thing is going to be dead in the water unless we can get the starting price under $2,000.” If the H-body had gotten the GM RCE, it would surely have gone the same way, for the same reasons.
On the flip side, a Vega dictated entirely by product planning, marketing, and sales would have been a Ford Maverick with a Chevrolet badge…..
I remember reading it when it came out and thinking this was a company that was bound to fail, hard as it was to believe in 1979. A sad story coming after such greatness for so many decades of memorable cars.
The book is available to read online for free at the Internet Archive.
Read this when it came out and had followed his career up to that point. My takeaway was never trust somebody with a fake chin.
Sounds like a message from a fortune cookie.
Words to live by. Does that extend to all surgical enhancements?
We’d have to go thru a list, some good and bad.
He was a narcissist and had some good ideas but he couldn’t run a company. As many pointed out, he could identify the problems but he brought no real long term solutions.
I can’t remember or find the source of it but I swear I remember a similar verified comment from Bill Mitchell in an article. I enjoyed this book when I checked it out from the local library in my early 20s, but that comment from another GM “personality” I read around the same time(which may well have been here at CC as I think I discovered the book from it) was a great reality check from being sucked into the cult of personality of JZD.
A note on the Sloan book, which I’ve read many, many times. Old Alfred didn’t write it, John McDonald did. A senior editor at Fortune, Sloan gave him numerous interviews and access to his papers. The result was a tremendous success: Sloan loved it, Doubleday loved it…then Sloan stopped publication due to pressure from GM lawyers, who believed it was potentially a prefabricated anti-trust indictment. McDonald sued and won, which is why we are able to read the book at all. Later in life McDonald wrote his story up in a terrific little book with a long title: A Ghost’s Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan’s My Years with General Motors. It’s available for free on the Internet Archive, highly recommended for any and all GM obsessives.
Thanks for that info Michael. Crazy how closely it mirrors the Clear Day backstory
Thanks for this — I wasn’t familiar with the McDonald book until you mentioned it, and it’s very interesting.