Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
I love that quote. Simply awesome. It describes the situation perfectly… If you screw up, you have now learned a way not to do something, go find a new way that takes that into account and do better. That works for your personal life as well as for business…
That is what our American auto industry needs to do. Rethink what they are doing with the past mistakes in mind and go and accomplish it. For too long we depended on vehicles that weren’t really sustainable. We knew we had an oil issue going on, yet we continued to rush ahead thinking that is the future. It was never the future, it was just something that was right now and when the oil issue got reacquainted with the American public it caught our big three auto makers entirely with their pants down. It shouldn’t have.
It is good to see more of a rush being put on the electrics and hybrids but how much better would it have been for the US if they had started that serious push 10 years ago, or 15 while the companies were blushing from the profits from the SUV’s? Instead of putting more and more money into designing SUVs, put it into the cars that were the true future. I know some work was done previously, I saw bits and pieces of it around Dearborn when I poked around there daily years ago. But it wasn’t at all being pushed to the extent it is today.
If we look at the American Auto Industry right now I think we would be silly not to consider it a failure in today’s times. They wouldn’t need the bailout if they weren’t. They spent years watching the floor dropping out of the SUV market and failed to react. They can blame it on anything in the mortgage or finance markets they want to[1] but it is the simple fact that they didn’t find a good fuel efficient car that could be made in an efficient profitable way that really buried them. At no point was it realistic to think that they would continue making money on trucks and SUVs. Toyota and Honda has been showing them a different way for many years. Hopefully the “good ol boys” have learned. I am not saying that trucks and SUVs shouldn’t have been and shouldn’t be made, quite the contrary, I just don’t think they should have been depended on as nearly the sole point of profit for the companies.
joe
P.S. Oh where did that quote above come from? Give yourself a gold star if your said Henry Ford.
[1] I think there is quite a bit that could be said about sending the manufacturing and support of stuff to India and other low cost centers of the world and how that has worked to nearly destroy the big 3 but I won’t go there for now[2].
[2] Though I do think that outsourcing of IT to India is probably going to be looked back upon as one of the most stupid things America ever did when we no longer have junior level tech people to be able to grow up into senior level tech people… Instead of pushing jobs to India and other low cost centers, we should be looking at better automation and getting better more intelligent admins who are more efficient at what they do. That will be the next step likely AFTER the costs in India and other low cost centers have risen so dramatically that they can’t be afforded any longer. Smaller groups of truly good people who do far more.
