Here in the Española valley of northern New Mexico, we’ve now experienced serious displacements cause by fire and ice. Our reactions to each were very different.
More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.
The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.
One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.
The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.
The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.
When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.
When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.
Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.
While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.
The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.
The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.
It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.
But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.
In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.
The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.
The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.
Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.
More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.
Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.
Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.
Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.
Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.
KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.
Showing posts with label Culture Failure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture Failure. Show all posts
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Sunday, July 19, 2009
George Romney and Robert MacNamara
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.
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.
Friday, July 03, 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.
Monday, June 29, 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.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Design - Part 2 - Logos
We all read about General Motor’s declining market share. I got curious about how statistics that influence Wall Street stock traders translated into the real world. After all, if a large part of the market is rental companies and the well-to-do who trade cars every year, then the market may represent only a fraction of the vehicles on the road.
I started counting the number of cars that passed me in traffic that were made by GM, Ford or Chrysler. What surprised me was not the results, about evenly divided between the Big Three and the others, but the difficulty of determining who made which vehicle.
I confess I’ve never been much interested in what cars look like, and could never play children’s identification games. I could easily be the prototype for those playful stories written about what a Martian or 22nd century archaeologist would think.
Still, when I started to look, I was struck by how true it is that most cars look alike, that many station wagons (SUVs) look alike, that most pickup trucks look alike, even how similar are sports cars. Only VW’s and Jeeps are still recognizable, and only some of those.
I turned to reading the car name or logo, and discovered another problem. Most names on cars assume the watcher already knows who makes what, is an informed consumer. The logos are hard to find, and most are interchangeable. It took several days to determine some weren’t fancy hood latches, and longer to learn which logos and models went with which manufacturers.
Ford’s blue oval is the most recognizable: the colored shape is instantly recognizable and it’s usually placed on the right side by the rear taillight where a driver is most likely to be looking in traffic. Most of the others are chrome designs in hollow circles under the center brake lights. One doesn’t have time in traffic to distinguish internals of common shapes when detail blurs at more than a car length.
Apparently everyone is selling understated elegance. Only older cars and trucks have names that are large enough to read at any safe driving distance. The logos for both Chevrolet and Ford have been shrunk. The one for Oldsmobile has been so modernized, I had to decode it to connect it with its maker.
After a while, I started speculating on how many logos were really the same. If I turned the Oldsmobile rocket slightly, I had an Accura; if I turned it some more I had a Lexus. How does one tell the Oldsmobile logo from the ruptured duck of Lake Central air lines, what would a Rorschach test make of it? This is not the kind of speculation designers should be inviting in traffic.
At the time I was pondering the failure of automotive designers to create unique, identifiable vehicles, GM was selling its mortgage finance division, GMAC. The photographs I saw of the executives showed them wearing identical grey suits and yellow or red ties. Similar photographs of Ford executives announcing plant closings in January of this year, 2006, showed them in similar grey suits, with nondescript ties.
The only difference between the executives: GM grey was more bluish, Ford grey more brown. The GM ties stood out more than the Ford ones, but, by calling attention to themselves, exaggerated the impression they were somehow not right.
The message they delivered, like the logos, was not the one intended. They were supposed to personify power and elegance, a united management team. They didn’t want to show the diversity that appears in work place meetings, where some wear suits, some sport coats. Most wear white shirts, some wear blue. The majority wear ties, some bolos. Jerry York appears in a turtleneck.
Instead, they were like the automobiles and logos they market. They demonstrated they could not show distinguishing individual traits within the range of what was defined as acceptable.
One could go a step farther, and note that the men in the GM photograph had similar builds, similar hairstyles, were of the same general age. At Ford, three of the men on stage had similar characteristics, and were little different than the GM executives. Indeed, there’s nothing that distinguishes Bill Ford from Rick Wagoner to the uninitiated.
Ford had five men on stage, and the other two were physically different. The finance man, Don Leclair, was silver haired and slightly built. Jim Padilla, Ford’s president, was a big man who dwarfed those around him. His bones were big, his shoulders were wide, his skull was large. He’s the only one who came up through the plant floor, and the only one whose body language in a New York Times photograph signaled his disapproval of what he was hearing.
Padilla’s the first to be removed. David Cole tells us, he "helped management reconnect with Ford’s people in the plants and with Ford’s dealers after the chaos of early 2001." Now that the company is closing the plants he salvaged, the company needs someone who will "not get consumed himself in what will be a very difficult process."
Bill Ford is going to use a committee, not someone described as a "fiery" engineer from a Detroit Mexican-Irish family.
Automobiles are about style and performance. Logos and demeanor in public forums distill style into potent symbols. These suggest companies haunted by Henry Ford’s antisemitism and William Durant’s flamboyance, the failure of Edsel and GM models not remembered, companies who’ve spent too many years defining themselves as what they are not.
Now it’s time to define who they are, and they fear strong individuals, who are the only ones who’ve ever made a difference. Instead, they bury themselves in consensus. No doubt public relations advisors submit logos to focus groups to identify anything that might put off some customer. Likewise, experts no doubt suggest how men should dress, based on research like that of James Molloy on how people respond to clothing.
Committees may avoid failure, conformity may reassure Wall Street; they don’t guarantee success and they obviously don’t sell cars.
Sources:
Cole, David. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "Ford president Jim Padilla to retire," Detroit Free Press,
6 April 2006.
Ford plant closing photographs, Fabrizio Costantini, The New York Times, 24 January 2006, and The Detroit News, 24 January 2006.
GMAC sale photograph, Rebecca Cook, Reuters, The Detroit News, 3 April 2006.
Molloy, John T. Dress for Success, 1975.
York, Jerry. Photograph, Jeff Kowalski, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, 29 March 2006.
I started counting the number of cars that passed me in traffic that were made by GM, Ford or Chrysler. What surprised me was not the results, about evenly divided between the Big Three and the others, but the difficulty of determining who made which vehicle.
I confess I’ve never been much interested in what cars look like, and could never play children’s identification games. I could easily be the prototype for those playful stories written about what a Martian or 22nd century archaeologist would think.
Still, when I started to look, I was struck by how true it is that most cars look alike, that many station wagons (SUVs) look alike, that most pickup trucks look alike, even how similar are sports cars. Only VW’s and Jeeps are still recognizable, and only some of those.
I turned to reading the car name or logo, and discovered another problem. Most names on cars assume the watcher already knows who makes what, is an informed consumer. The logos are hard to find, and most are interchangeable. It took several days to determine some weren’t fancy hood latches, and longer to learn which logos and models went with which manufacturers.
Ford’s blue oval is the most recognizable: the colored shape is instantly recognizable and it’s usually placed on the right side by the rear taillight where a driver is most likely to be looking in traffic. Most of the others are chrome designs in hollow circles under the center brake lights. One doesn’t have time in traffic to distinguish internals of common shapes when detail blurs at more than a car length.
Apparently everyone is selling understated elegance. Only older cars and trucks have names that are large enough to read at any safe driving distance. The logos for both Chevrolet and Ford have been shrunk. The one for Oldsmobile has been so modernized, I had to decode it to connect it with its maker.
After a while, I started speculating on how many logos were really the same. If I turned the Oldsmobile rocket slightly, I had an Accura; if I turned it some more I had a Lexus. How does one tell the Oldsmobile logo from the ruptured duck of Lake Central air lines, what would a Rorschach test make of it? This is not the kind of speculation designers should be inviting in traffic.
At the time I was pondering the failure of automotive designers to create unique, identifiable vehicles, GM was selling its mortgage finance division, GMAC. The photographs I saw of the executives showed them wearing identical grey suits and yellow or red ties. Similar photographs of Ford executives announcing plant closings in January of this year, 2006, showed them in similar grey suits, with nondescript ties.
The only difference between the executives: GM grey was more bluish, Ford grey more brown. The GM ties stood out more than the Ford ones, but, by calling attention to themselves, exaggerated the impression they were somehow not right.
The message they delivered, like the logos, was not the one intended. They were supposed to personify power and elegance, a united management team. They didn’t want to show the diversity that appears in work place meetings, where some wear suits, some sport coats. Most wear white shirts, some wear blue. The majority wear ties, some bolos. Jerry York appears in a turtleneck.
Instead, they were like the automobiles and logos they market. They demonstrated they could not show distinguishing individual traits within the range of what was defined as acceptable.
One could go a step farther, and note that the men in the GM photograph had similar builds, similar hairstyles, were of the same general age. At Ford, three of the men on stage had similar characteristics, and were little different than the GM executives. Indeed, there’s nothing that distinguishes Bill Ford from Rick Wagoner to the uninitiated.
Ford had five men on stage, and the other two were physically different. The finance man, Don Leclair, was silver haired and slightly built. Jim Padilla, Ford’s president, was a big man who dwarfed those around him. His bones were big, his shoulders were wide, his skull was large. He’s the only one who came up through the plant floor, and the only one whose body language in a New York Times photograph signaled his disapproval of what he was hearing.
Padilla’s the first to be removed. David Cole tells us, he "helped management reconnect with Ford’s people in the plants and with Ford’s dealers after the chaos of early 2001." Now that the company is closing the plants he salvaged, the company needs someone who will "not get consumed himself in what will be a very difficult process."
Bill Ford is going to use a committee, not someone described as a "fiery" engineer from a Detroit Mexican-Irish family.
Automobiles are about style and performance. Logos and demeanor in public forums distill style into potent symbols. These suggest companies haunted by Henry Ford’s antisemitism and William Durant’s flamboyance, the failure of Edsel and GM models not remembered, companies who’ve spent too many years defining themselves as what they are not.
Now it’s time to define who they are, and they fear strong individuals, who are the only ones who’ve ever made a difference. Instead, they bury themselves in consensus. No doubt public relations advisors submit logos to focus groups to identify anything that might put off some customer. Likewise, experts no doubt suggest how men should dress, based on research like that of James Molloy on how people respond to clothing.
Committees may avoid failure, conformity may reassure Wall Street; they don’t guarantee success and they obviously don’t sell cars.
Sources:
Cole, David. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "Ford president Jim Padilla to retire," Detroit Free Press,
6 April 2006.
Ford plant closing photographs, Fabrizio Costantini, The New York Times, 24 January 2006, and The Detroit News, 24 January 2006.
GMAC sale photograph, Rebecca Cook, Reuters, The Detroit News, 3 April 2006.
Molloy, John T. Dress for Success, 1975.
York, Jerry. Photograph, Jeff Kowalski, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, 29 March 2006.
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