Sixty To Zero - An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors...

I just finished reading "Sixty to Zero", an engaging and insightful read by Alex Taylor III on the collapse of General Motors.

He succinctly articulates what I've always thought. The reasons why Detroit has produced so many duds is because the companies have mistakenly tried to satisfy right brain desires of the market using left brain answers, filtered through a host of other management issues on top of that.

...Band-Aid solutions like needs segmentation provided only mechanistic solutions to emotional problems: creating cars that people wanted to buy.

They had not figured out how to offer usable fantasy as well as their competition.

Think for a moment about the world of fashion. Imagine a company that makes pants, and they make them from burlap sacks and use rope for a belt. They do this because it's cheap and the pants work. But would you ever buy them?

Pretty much the same thing happened with cars in Detroit. The people who ran things didn't "get it". These days they're turning out better cars than ever but it remains to be seen if the Detroit 3 can really turn things around.