Word: iacocca
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Chrysler's second success story bodes well for its incoming management. The first comeback belonged almost exclusively to Chrysler's self-touting legend, Iacocca, who towed the company out of the wilderness in the early 1980s. The second was much more the victory of a management team that learned painful lessons and persevered through fierce internal clashes. In late 1987, Chrysler was slipping again, and Iacocca began to recognize the problems, including the overly autocratic force of his own leadership. He instigated what has since become known as Truth Week, during which the company's top 500 executives went...
Even more surprising was Iacocca's admission that in spite of all his public Japan-bashing, Japan was in fact building superior cars. After the retreat, Chrysler assembled a team of 25 young recruits to spend a year at Honda's plant in Marysville, Ohio, to study everything from its assembly methods to corporate culture, which the Japanese company allowed as a political courtesy. No senior executives went along on the mission. "We wanted open minds not poisoned by Detroit," admits Iacocca. Their report, still secret, led to a greater emphasis on customer satisfaction, an increase in continual training...
...became a matter of necessity because Chrysler was preparing to eliminate 23,000 salaried and hourly jobs, fully 25% of its work force. That meant not only streamlining its bureaucratic structure and reducing layers of supervisers, but also ending the turf wars between separate divisions, especially design and engineering. Iacocca himself agreed to surrender some of the chairman's prerogatives, including military-style reviews on the design floor in which he had been able to issue imperial orders for a new grill design or a new fender curve...
...opinions -- a $22 souvenir program, really, of the radio show -- and it sits for weeks atop the New York Times best-seller list; with 1.1 million copies in print a month after its publication date, The Way Things Ought to Be is the hottest hard-cover nonfiction title since Iacocca. Then he tries TV, and within a few weeks his late-night harangue is beating Whoopi Goldberg in the ratings and is up there with David Letterman and Arsenio Hall. These days, Rush is so busy that, as he lamented on the radio recently, "I don't even know what...
...grocery clerk or some high-skill, high-wage position they cannot dream of getting. What to do with these workers, how to make them productive consumers, is the fundamental dilemma of the American economy. "Every time I lay off 3,000 guys," says Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, "I know there are 3,000 less customers who are able to buy our products...