Retired Chrysler chairman (and Snoop Dogg homey) Lee Iacocca will be releasing a book in approximately one year, tentatively titled "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?". It's said to cover several topics, among them the state of the American auto industry and the threat that the US manufacturing economy faces from China and India.
Iacocca is said to be writing the book because he "flunked retirement" and "there is too much to be done to sit on the sidelines." The octogenarian has not been quiet since leaving Chrysler in 1992, having attempted a $20B buyout of the automaker in 1995 (with Kirk Kerkorian and current GM board member Jerry York), along with campaigning for George W. Bush in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.
[Source: Houston Chronicle]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael Karesh @ Jun 9th 2006 4:20PM
Iaccoca hasn't had a clue about what it takes to compete for at least twenty years. Give him control of an auto company and his first move would probably be to put a Landau roof on everything.
There's also nothing about Cadillac's XLR that couldn't be fixed with a wood-panel "Town & Country" edition. Anyone else remember that car?
Howard Kerr @ Jun 9th 2006 4:33PM
It's funny, I'm kind of mixed in my feelings about Mr. I. He's supposed to have given the car world the original and most successful ponycar....and also gave us the K-cars. Talk about your highs and lows. Now I see he campaigned for Bush in 2000 but then for Kerry in 2004. He wants to keep a hand in the car biz, but wears those up-to-his-armpits golfpants while "palling around" with Snoop. It's a bitch to get old.
iQuack @ Jun 9th 2006 5:15PM
I think back about how Mr. I. saved Chrysler by convincing the U.S. Gov't to guarantee bank loans that Chrysler was ultimately able to pay off early. It was a good show at the time.
But sometimes I wonder if Chrysler should have been allowed to go broke and its assets sold. More business would have been directed to GM and Ford after Chrysler's demise and 18 years later, Chrysler was taken over by Mercedes anyway.
Was probably a good thing to save the company to the extent that shareholders and creditors weren't stiffed by a Chrysler failure, but maybe GM and Ford would be in better shape today if they saw that they wouldn't receive government help if they foundered. Could be that the expectation of receiving Uncle Sam's largesse if the worst happened has been a contributor to GM and Ford's malaise.
Just some thoughts.
Lithous @ Jun 9th 2006 5:53PM
How about he got to skip WWII (for college IIRC from reading his first book when it came out) and then advertises for (German) Chrysler now. I wonder if he'd be as nice to advertise their cars if he had Germans shooting at him at one time in his life. I mean, he has a history with Ford too. He could have gone back to them or made it a trifecta and done some work with GM. Nah, money talks and patriotism walks, Baby.
gbh @ Jun 9th 2006 6:55PM
Perhaps Chrysler should have been allowed to sink. In a perfect world, that would have served as a wake-up call to Ford and GM management. In reality, it would have *maybe* put the GM/Ford crisis a little farther out. It might have even hastened it, since those chuckleheads would have just seen themselves as even less needing to compete. Product would have (if you can even imagine it) been worse.
Also, the world of finance was MUCH different then. If the rules that historically were followed to protect companies, stockholders and customers were still being followed - Enron would have never happened. GM and Ford would both be out of business. GM currently has unfunded direct liabilites of 25B to 80B depending on how much fairy dust you sprinkle on the numbers. It would take multiple miracles to get out of that hole.
Compared to the pathetic corporate spin political robots running GM, Ford - Iaccoca was William the Conqueror.
China Law Blog @ Jun 9th 2006 6:57PM
With all due respect to Mr. Iaccoca, does he have enough knowledge regarding Indian and Chinese manufacturing to write such a book?
Mal Fuller @ Jun 9th 2006 10:03PM
Lee's forgotten more than R. Wagoner and B. Ford ever knew! Obviously if GW had worked for Chrysler, Lee wouldn't have let him have a "second term". That makes him smarter than many voters. Lee's proven over and over that there's no substitute for brains!
dakota @ Jun 9th 2006 10:40PM
"How about he got to skip WWII (for college IIRC from reading his first book when it came out) and then advertises for (German) Chrysler now. I wonder if he'd be as nice to advertise their cars if he had Germans shooting at him at one time in his life. I mean, he has a history with Ford too. He could have gone back to them or made it a trifecta and done some work with GM. Nah, money talks and patriotism walks, Baby"
How about having a better history with Chrysler? What does WW2 have to do with the Current Daimler-Chrysler corp? Not a damn thing. I guess people shouldn't drive their Toyotas, Hondas, BMW's, Mercedes...ect. because of "what they did to us" too?
dakota @ Jun 9th 2006 10:43PM
"He's supposed to have given the car world the original and most successful ponycar....and also gave us the K-cars. Talk about your highs and lows."
The K-Car also became the ever so popular "Magic Wagon" the Dodge Caravan...which has been copied over and over time and time again.
Lithous @ Jun 9th 2006 11:17PM
"What does WW2 have to do with the Current Daimler-Chrysler corp? Not a damn thing."
Not true. Good or bad they are associated. Jeep created for WWII German fighting and is owned by (100% German owned) DCX. There you go, that qualifies as a damn thing. Here are some more... Chrysler known for Hemi, Germany known for wanting to take over the Hemi-sphere.
Put this: WWII site:mercedes-benz.com into google and see what comes up that they removed.
iQuack @ Jun 10th 2006 2:36AM
"Not true. Good or bad they are associated. Jeep created for WWII German fighting and is owned by (100% German owned) DCX. There you go, that qualifies as a damn thing."
The above comment from Lithous makes no sense. Jeep was owned by American Motors and had been Willys years before that.
Chrysler bought American Motors in 1987, I think. Jeeps are historically American, not German. I remember occasionally driving Willys Jeeps when I was in the U.S. Army in 1957. Jeep military vehcles were as American as apple pie if not more so.
No one should ever forgive what the Nazis did, but associating a German company with Nazis in this era is unfair, I think. The worst of the German bad guys are long gone.
The best reasons for not liking German cars is that they might be overpriced and less competent than competing cars. Of course, if anyone insists on bringing WWII into the discussion, you could hate Mitsubishi because of the Mitsubishi Zero airplane that the Japanese flew to shoot down Americans.
One of the things I like about Honda is that it's a guilt-free company because it wasn't started until 1948--3 years after the war ended. Of course, there's much more to like about Honda than that!
PJ @ Jun 10th 2006 3:40AM
"Not true. Good or bad they are associated. Jeep created for WWII German fighting and is owned by (100% German owned) DCX. There you go, that qualifies as a damn thing."
Personally, I'm waiting for someone to tell us we should boycott Aston Martin and Jaguar because of what they did to us at Lexington and Bunker Hill. I know someone's crazy enough to do it. Any takers?
Richard Warren @ Jun 10th 2006 8:27AM
"Personally, I'm waiting for someone to tell us we should boycott Aston Martin and Jaguar because of what they did to us at Lexington and Bunker Hill. I know someone's crazy enough to do it. Any takers?"
OK, we should!! Just kidding! Good one, PJ!
NEBTEK2002 @ Jun 10th 2006 9:20AM
Michael Karesh,landau roofs and fake wood are at least identifiably American styling cues.
Too many domestic brands are trying to be as bland as Toyota.
A big, burgundy sedan with lots of chrome and vinyl and pillow-back velour seats would stand out from the crowd of gray jelly beans with hard, "corrective" seats.
Other featured articles on this blog refer to young people going for "grandad" cars like old Caprices.
Iacocca could tap a whole new retro market.
Lithous @ Jun 10th 2006 10:20PM
I don't know what is so hard to understand here. I had one point which turned into two because I was told there was not a connection between WWII and DCX.
Let's recap.
1. Ioccoca was old enough to fight in WWII and skipped the fighting part. If he had fought like thousands of men in his position (fighting age during WWII) then he may have been shot at by Germans. Would he be advertising for (100% German owned) DCX if that was the case? And I'm guessing he may have known people who were killed by Germans. There are still Chinese guys that dislike Japan for what Japan did to China. It is a reasonable thought, mine of Ioccoca.
2. You ever see the show Connections? Jeep was started during WWII and now the name brand is owned by DCX. That's less than 7 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. That is like one or two degrees of separation.
That's all. Not too hard to understand.
"Personally, I'm waiting for someone to tell us we should boycott Aston Martin and Jaguar because of what they did to us at Lexington and Bunker Hill."
Except since Lexington and Bunker Hill England has been nothing but the most pro-American of all European countries and German has wanted to piss on us any chance they can. Oh, and Jaguar and Aston Martin are owned by Ford to boot. So try again.
I didn't tell you to boycott German cars anyway. I was disturbed by Ioccoca advertising for a German company when there was a huge chance that he could have been fighting them and he is old enough to know close friends and relatives who were killed over there. That is all. I was talking about him personally. If he was old enough to fight in Bunker Hill I would question his ties to England as well, how about that?
Lithous @ Jun 11th 2006 10:22AM
Maybe this will make the Jeep connection more clear. If WWII did not happen Jeep would probably not exist. If DCX wanted to they could can Jeep tomorrow (like they did Eagle).
Jeeps life depended on WWII and Jeeps life now depends on DCX. Is that a clear enough connection for you iQuack?
You know what I would like to do is go back in time to the 1940's and tell the soldiers fighting that in just over 50 years Jeep would be owned by a German company. Do you think they would believe me?
PJ @ Jun 11th 2006 7:58PM
I see the point, Lithous. But if I lived in the '40s and someone told me about the Jeep-DCX thing, I'd hope that I would think, "wow, how awesome that future generations in our contries will forget their differences, merge some of their most important corporations, and work side-by-side." Except... I probably wouldn't say "awesome." Maybe "swell."
The point you made about England illustrates this--they've been friendlier to the U.S. because it's been longer since our conflict. Don't you think it's more likely that, in 200 years, Germany and Japan could be the same way, given our corporate cooperation and interdependence, rather than trying to take over the U.S. with BMW-driving neo-Hitlers and Toyota-owning Hirohitos?
Lithous @ Jun 11th 2006 9:57PM
"I see the point, Lithous. But if I lived in the '40s and someone told me about the Jeep-DCX thing, I'd hope that I would think, "wow, how awesome that future generations in our contries will forget their differences, merge some of their most important corporations, and work side-by-side." Except... I probably wouldn't say "awesome." Maybe "swell.""
You're s'ing me. Give me a break. We should all give the communist party a big hug and they'll disband. We are just one big happy world aren't we. What country is first to give up their language? Much more efficient and safe (so when emergencies arise there is no language barrier) to have just one. And which country will be the first to sign up to have the UN be their 100% "federal" gov't?
But let's start with something easy, when are Toyota and Honda going to allow a non-Japanese to be an exec in Japan?
And open marriages are healthy for a strong relationship too. This is great. The world is going to be one big open happy place and no one (or country) is going to take advantage of it (like the Communist).
Would you still be all swell if you were told, "But Daimler will lie to make the merger happen". Yeah, I'm sure you and thousands of others fighting Germany would be fine with that. And be so progressive. You are making me laugh now.
Give me a break. There is a lot of things that need to happen before your John Lennon (Imagine) world happens. In the mean time it is mostly take take take from the U.S. to build everyone else up.
"Don't you think it's more likely that, in 200 years, Germany and Japan could be the same way, given our corporate cooperation and interdependence, rather than trying to take over the U.S. with BMW-driving neo-Hitlers and Toyota-owning Hirohitos?"
England literally knows they would have been destroyed without U.S. help. I don't think Germany and Japan have that same opinion of us. The U.S. and England shared some of their most Top Secret of information about themselves to one another because it was a dire time. That kind of relationship will be very hard to come by again.
Look, I don't thing Germany and Japan will attack us per se but economically, that is another story. And we are more than willing to hand over everything.
You know how we worry about our dependency on oil now? Wait until China has all the manufacturing expertise you can imagine from the world being so greedy for their slave labor. When some country is pissed at us the Chinese will sell them advanced weapons. How is Lockheed, Northrup and a handful of others supposed to keep up with every American and foreign company sending manufacturing expertise to China? Having great designs is fine but without execution to make these great designs (or the Chinese stealing any design they want). The world is not going to be the big happy place you think.
You can misinterpret what I say all you want but it is as simple as this: I can have many friends, doesn't mean I have to share my wife with them, and I'm sure the heck not a bad guy for not wanting to share certain things or give away everything.
PJ @ Jun 11th 2006 11:00PM
Well, Lithous, I was hoping this discussion would take a more mature direction. Anyway, history speaks for itself on my first point. Take a few college-level classes on economics, and you'll see that international trade interdependence generally leads to peace between the countries involved, because it's in both of their best interests. There's nothing "soft" or Communist about that, it's simply an extension of the trend our world has been following (with hiccups, of course) for the last couple thousand years. China, for example, has become far more open with the U.S. (not to mention more capitalist in general) in the past decade *precisely* because we are trading more with them.
I think you may have missed part of what I said about England. The reason America got to the point where we were sharing top-secret information with them is because time had healed the wounds of the Revolutionary War, our countries have a lot of shared culture, and many English people's businesses had put down roots in America, or had stakes in American businesses, and vice versa. It's more complicated than that, of course, but notice that we're now exporting more culture to Japan, Germany, et cetera (and vice versa), and our businesses are putting down roots in each other's countries. Give this trend another hundred years, and you've got yourself two staunch allies.
My intention isn't to misinterpret what you say. It's to have an intelligent debate about the dynamics of the car industry. So here's my take on it: in a hundred years, there will be only a few remaining (very large) automakers, fewer nations period as smaller ones merge... and considering that we're still by far the world's richest country, the U.S. will have a very large stake in *at least* one of those automakers.
On a side note, very often when countries get pissed at us, they're using weapons that *we*, not China, sold them a decade earlier. Also, the U.S. is hardly the world's whipping boy when it comes to "take, take, take." We've been taking advantage of Third World countries for strip-mining and cheap labor for decades. And it's the rest of the world that's learning English, not vice versa (there are actually more English speakers in China than in the U.S.). This has gotten so off-topic it's ridiculous, but I thought I should touch on those points of interest.