Ford's answers to the NHTSA 6.7 Investigation

ricatic wrote:
snip....
Is this discussion relevant...you bet it is

Yup, and try, too often but will continue...I'm retired.... :B , and
have some time between taking care of mom and the other stuff going on
(busier than ever)

What folks don't understand is that lawyers and bean counters manage
everything.

They do NOT care, generally, about their product...just the bottom line
that their bonuses, options and raises are based (why still lots of
foreign firms have exec's who still manage their product, as they are NOT
quarterly based in their horizon).

How does Carly's acquisition affect all of this?...well, today's vehicles
are more computers than anything else. Saw that when GM asked some guys
from SunLabs to take a look at their EV1, which was JAVA'ised. Found
that they had it almost right, but independent systems fighting to
see who was going to be the master vs slave (my other background is
in systems controls for industrial systems). Once 'one' was told it was
the master and the rest slaves...all was well...after a few other tweaks

My fav director of marketing left to go work for Compaq and what the
heck was that? Texas???? when he is a left coast kind of guy... Well
he knew that they were packaging themselves for acquisition and
he brought with him some of my fav scientists who now work for that
dieing corporation

Again: ".....Is this discussion relevant...you bet it is...." take
Apple, my prime example of this metric, and how they got up there,
lost their way, to then find themselves again

I've worked with/against both Jobs and Wozniak (both of them, the
Apple guy and my boss...VP of engineering at Sun). Jobs got Apple up
there, then the board decided they wanted a MBA (bean counter) to
take it from there. They hired Sculley (some other huge corporation,
think Pepsi) who is the ultimate bean counter (MBA...nothing wrong
with an MBA if they have the vision to manage their 'product', but
most only manage to the bottom line)

Sculley ran Apple almost down to the ground with the quarterly bottom
line metrics.

Jobs created several other companies and the last one, Apple acquired.

Since the board was falling out of favor with Sculley, they put Jobs
back in as CEO...he switched to managing their product and now it is
one of the most valued corporations in the world...after almost failing
just a few years ago

Again, how does this apply to this topic...well I see that this automotive
OEM is managing their bottom line (quarterly horizon or vision) and
losing the battle all the while profitable quarterly

If they had the vision to manage their product, they would have taken
or changed course after it was clear what was going on, IMHO

I say manage your product, not your quarterly bottom line

PS...I know this well as while in college working part time as a designer
and designed the system to the prime who was on contract with Ford
to modernize some factories and their suppliers...presented to one
GM who funded this....got to the 'issues and risks'.

Went over their ROI and that they would be in the red for 4-6 years
depending on sales and margins (we were going to increase their margins
by a large factor)

He turned to ask his #1, what is ROI...I heard that and was immensely
surprised....Spoke up and told him...he then got up and on his way out
the door...told his #1 to kill this

This was in the early 70's when the Japanese were starting to eat
Detroit's lunch

When at SunLabs, one of my teams found a way to change the CPU, a
multi scalier (now Intel calls it multi threaded). Sales folks called
me in and my team was installing them at a Ford design center.

Found that it was the math section that was killing Intel (that is when
they found that it rounded wrong).

Got tossed out of that design center....talked to some designers while
waiting for some of their PCs to boot (slaves to our servers).

Found that they were reducing the hard gold plating from 5 microns to
something around 1.5 microns. What???...hey do you know that in a high
vibration environment...that will wear through and become a potential
high resistance connection?...Also found that they were reducing
the wire gauge...custom gauge to boot...that VP of engineering got
wind of my comments and had me tossed out of that building...knew
right then that Fords would have higher incidences of fires...

Why I say Detroit still doesn't get it...