Intellectual Diversity and Making Cars

Chief Executive has an interesting interview with Robert Lutz of General Motors. An excerpt:

How do you induce, manage and then leverage creativity?

Of what use is physical diversity without intellectual diversity? With diversity, we’ve focused on making sure we have a bunch of people who all look different. Not enough attention is paid to making sure that we have people whose brains are wired differently. We now actively recruit people who are well-educated and enthusiastic and conversant with cars, but do not necessarily have a finance or even an engineering background.

The other thing we did was unshackle design. Over the last 20 years, design was compressed into a very narrow box. Other priorities took precedence. How far away is the side glass from the occupants’ head? How much headroom is there? How good is the visibility outside the car? When everybody else had defined the car with these limitations, design was told, okay, now wrap this for us.

You can’t get there from here. You must let designers have a new, off-the-wall idea and then ask, “What is the minimum amount of compromise we have to accept to make this design feasible?” That’s how we run it now, and it makes a huge difference. Just look at the Malibu, the Saturn Aura, our new big crossovers, the GMC Acadia, the Saturn Outlook, the soon-to-be-introduced Buick Enclave. GM is hitting its stride again both in terms of execution but also in terms of creativity.