On the subject of the cultural climate of MBz in the 1970s

[michaeld]

We've all seen squawking kids running around restaurants while their lazy parents did nothing.  Good parents have to struggle mightily against a lot of negative forces to turn out good kids; but bad parents will churn out bad kids darn near everytime, won't they?

You'll have to indulge me to explain how that has anything to do with cars.

I saw an article that got me thinking about applying this concept to carmakers.  "General Malaise" by respected economist Dr. Peter Moroci (I saw it in the Press Enterprise Opinion section, pg B9, July 20,2006).  He essentially says that GM's proposed merger with Nissan and Renault will not save GM; rather, he said, their problems are due to heavy bureaucracy, a complacent board, and excessive labor costs.

According to Moroci, GM pays out $40 US more per per worker per hour for labor than do the North American arms of Toyota and Honda, and that that margin well exceeds GMs now infamous unfunded obligations to retired workers.  In addition to this, GM has a "legendarily heavy bureacracy" which is driving up the cost of product design, engineering, and marketing even as it provides a drag for innovation in those areas.  As a result, Moroci claims, GM is compensating by  using cheaper materials,  downgrading component specs, and using older, less attractive technology.

Will a merger to become bigger help?  Not so, says Moroci.  A couple of pointed sentences: "Pooling parts purchases with Nissan and Renault won't get GM lower prices.  GM, the biggest automaker on the planet, already has hammered many of its suppliers into bankruptcy.  GM doesn't need more leverage to buy water pumps; it needs to pay less for labor so it can afford to buy decent parts."  Another: "If size would solve the "GM-makes-dull-cars problem," Kerkorian [the mega shareholder proposing the deal with Nissan-Renault] has an obligation to explain to shareholders why GM can't make cars as reliable and attractive as little Honda."  And one more: "The real problem at GM is that [GM CEO] Wagoner lacks the stomach to negotiate a realistic contract with the United Auto Workers and lacks the management skills to clean up GM's bureacracy, or else his board won't let him.  Either way, the problem is not the size of the company."

Assuming for the sake of argument that the main details and conclusions of this article are correct, I see a company that is far more concerned with protecting entrenched bureacracies and a stagnating corporate culture than they are with making good quality automobiles.  And that is dangerous, because they are suppose to be in the business of accomplishing the latter, and not the former.

What does this have to do with Mercedes Benz in the 1970s, you ask?  Absolutely nothing.  Or does it?

In this interesting article we have one man's [Dr. Moroci's] opinion of GM in the 2000s.  We see some of GMs mindsets and dilemmas.  Here's the question: what do we know about the cultural climate of Mercedes-Benz in the 1970s?

Allow me at this time to tie my introduction in with my actual point.  Dysfunctional parents churn out bad kids; dysfunctional automakers will invariably churn out bad cars.  We can go into the "nature vs. nurture/biology vs. sociology" debate on kids and parenting, of course; with corporations, it's more simple: bad nurture/sociology creates a warped mentality that ultimately manifests itself as bad nature/biology - i.e. a corporation poisons its own "gene pool."  My fear is that GM has so poisoned its genetic culture that it may never return.

Some of you have have mentioned having some interesting old articles, advertisments, and books that might give substantial insight into this topic.  What can we learn about the cultural climate of Mercedes-Benz during the development and production of our w116s?  What were the issues and crises that they faced, and what character did they reveal in their response to them?

Just wondering,
Mike

[OzBenzHead]

Well, Mike, you raise some interesting questions there - directly and indirectly.

I have planned to include any such (relevant) material in my W116 book project, hoping to show how the D-B corporate culture(s) influenced the product (whilst keeping to the topic of the W116 series).  Such information as I have gleaned so far from my online access to the M-B M@RS (Archives) database does hint at strong personalities and strong corp. culture and philosophy having major influences on the make's vehicle design, production, quality, placement, etc. - although at this point I'd be hard pressed to explain in any detail.  Suffice to say I shall keep an eye on this thread for others' perceptions, thoughts, knowledge ... on the topic.

One contact I have might yet be a channel to a former M-B senior figure; I'm hopeful of that connection bearing interesting fruit (both for the W116 book and another M-B-related publishing project - about persons more than products).

I do like your analogy, Mike, of the funtional/disciplined family and its quality of offspring raising and the comparison with the dysfunctional; there is a certain logic on the surface of that, but I need to ponder it longer ...

[Denis]

Hello gentlemen

This is a major subject but I only want to say that I believe that the values behind classic Mercedes-Benz cars has NOTHING to do with any of the values of today or even 20 years ago.

A long time ago, people said : "Good morning sir" and were proud of their trade, some did their best to do the best possible quality work and command a good price for their wares. Some excelled and claimed to be the best engineers... artists... intellectuals.

All that is gone now, IMHO, due to a general decline of western civilisation. We have become so politically correct taht we cannot figure out where we are going of why we have so many delinquants 

Today, people said nothing when they see you, see their trade as a way to earn a bloody living, some do their best to impress you into thinking that they do "quality" and command whatever fools like you will pay for their wares. Some excel and claim to rake in a lot of money by any (smart and legal) ways possible.

At the root of what I know about our beloved classics is a voice recording of Rudolph Uhlenhaut talking about his Grand Prix years (1938-1940). The young enginneer had been promoted in 1938 - his infamous REAL boss demanded  results WITHIN given budgets. For instance, the Mercedes-Benz team could not "afford" to blow up too many engines, so young Rudi and friends came up with a strange idea : test all the parts of an engine and then assemble them carefully - with a bit of luck and good testing, the engines should hold and NOT  blow up - keeping the fuehrer's accountants happy 

So they built valve spring testers, piston testers, etc - that was cheap, there were plenty of good machinists. All this WORKED well and everybody knows how Mercedes dominated Grand prix racing in those last years before the war.

Once the reich had been atomized to bits, along with the factory, things picked up slowly and for one reason or another, the "test everything and assemble" method was revived for production car purposes. This worked beyond all expectations ! But by the early seventies, this excessive "quality" mindset had seriously reduced the margins on these vehicules. Back then, Mercedes-Benz was proud to say that one out of ten employee was a QA man !!!

Of course old Rudi like this idea of quality - people liked my Grand prix racers, my 300SLR, ...Rudi was not part of the mindset of the "modern" world : he said : "Good morning sir" and was proud of his trade, he wanted the best possible quality and asked a good price for his wares. He excelled and WAS a great engineer and a real gentleman, I am told by Paul Bracq who knew him well.

All that is history fellows and you own one of the last cars with that mentality behind it. Be proud !!!

Denis

Paris, France

And yes, the horrible truth is that National Socialism was a catalyst for this quality drive 

[michaeld]

Great post, Denis

You bring up so many interesting points!  I'd like to throw in on a couple for your feedback.

Most of you probably won't particularly want to comment on this post; it is simple "here" to expand on what Denis said.

Let me start with MBz and the Nazis.  I read a chapter out of a book I borrowed from the library that was quite interesting on that subject.  Mercedes-Benz was not particularly fond of the national socialism espoused by Hitler.  A fair number of senior engineers were Jews, as well as several of the wives of senior execs.  Their goal was to survive Hitler and keep the company going while participating in Nazism as little as possible.  They were hardly like the industrialists in Germany and Japan that screamed for war and its accompanying profits.  I don't remember MBz being singled out for "Schindler's List"-styled heroism, but they were decent men trying to survive - and bring their beloved company through - evil times.

After the war, Mbz - like all of Germany - was in ruins.  A Great Depression unlike any faced by the US in the 20's and 30's gripped Germany.  People were starving to death.  MBz geared up as quickly as possible to save itself and its employees from death.  They began building pre-war cars (i.e. simple car designs drawn up before the war) and fought and scratched their way to some success.  Employees were loyal because this company was loyal to them.  They were loyal because they could work of they could starve in the streets.  They were loyal because the company mentality was, "We are all in this mess together.  Let's get out of it together by rebuilding a better car and a better Germany."

Denis, you also mentioned the decline of Western Civ, and its result on ALL carmakers.  I heartily agree with you there as well.  The Modern world lived between 1789 (the fall of the Bastille in France) and 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall).  Postmodernism has been allowed to flourish since.  Essentially, the pre-modern world  believed in God - or the gods - and believed there was some deeper meaning behind the divinely created order of the world.  Modernism wanted to throw out everything - faith included - and make human reason alone the final arbiter of all things.  The idea was to create a foundation for all knowledge based on human reason alone.  The problem was, reason alone - devoid of any presuppositions from faith - could not answer the fundamental mysteries of life, and thus descended into skepticism.  People like Voltaire invented terms like "Enlightenment" vs. "Dark Ages" to describe modernism in order to create the illusion of a schism between faith and reason.  The reality is, faith justifies human reason (if our brains are merely the agglomeration of random particles in motion, how do you even justify intelligence?  And if God created the world for man, then he created a world that man could understand and interact with; the truth is that science uniquely emerged from the Christian West, and that science without the presuppositions of faith was impossible).  An interesting tidbit: the founders of every major modern branch of science were publicly confessed Christians.

Postmodernism takes that skeptisism that Modernism introduced and runs with it.  Genuine knowledge becomes impossible.  Nothing transcends human culture(s).  There is no deeper meaning to anything.  What you see is what you get.  Postmodernism seizes Frederich Neitzsche's view that God is dead, and all that remains is human will to power.  We all manipulate other people/groups/cultures for our own ends.  Postmodernism descends into cynicism, skepticism, and a dislike of reality.  We create our own worlds, our own realities.  Postmodernism today is dominating the mindset of the Western world's intelligentsia.  Interestingly, the inevitable result of the tenants of postmodernism (reality is a social construction, cultures determine all values, individuality is a myth, and human beings can only find meaning by losing themselves in the larger group) - is FACISM.  Postmodernism and the facism of the Nazis share the identical underlying premises. 

Why do I bring this up and give you a free (mayhaps unwanted) philosophy lesson?  Because genuine craftsmanship is a truly premodern-world phenomena.  "Old world quality" comes from a premodern view of the world that trusts in a deeper purpose behind the craft than merely manipulating molecules.  One builds great things because God - or the gods (a nod to the ancient Hellenistic world that accepted mind-body dualism) made us to build great things.  Happiness - the Aristotelian notion of eudamonia - is the result of realizing the full postential of what you were created to be.

As we lose that, we degenerate into the crass world of materialism for the sake of materialism and the production of quality goods becomes nothing more than the marketing of products.

BTW, the Islamic-fascists terrorists are themselves a model of postmodernism.  A group segmented from the rest of society and insulated by its own self-identity; a group that recognizes no values apart from its own; a group that feels no pangs of guilt about murder because people are not seen as individuals, but as members of groups who share collective guilt.  Such group identity, group, responsibility, group injury, and group blame define the mindset of fascism - and postmodernism.  As the world increasingly dissolves into tribalism and group against group, remember the label "postmodern."

As to Denis' description of Rudolph Uhlenhaut and his exploits and philosophy, I shall leave that for others to develop.  That's really the kind of thing I wanted to explore on this thread (NOT postmodernism!).

I cited GM as an example of a company that is heading in the wrong direction, and is therefore building cars that suffer as a result.  What direction was MBz of the 1970's heading in?

[Denis]

Hi michaeld and all

What direction was MBz of the 1970's heading in?

By financial necessity (dwindling profits), into the post-modern view of things.

Nazis and Mercedes-Benz : while it is true that educated people did not like Hitler, and especially the German aristocrats (it was count Claus von Stauffenberg who headed the assassination attempt in 1944), it was Hitler who LIKED Mercedes-Benz, in fact MBZ was supposed to build the volkswagen.

One comment on science : it is a real part of European heritage to have invited "science" as we know it. This came when wise men thought that not everything need be explained by what the "gods" are doing and that men might be able to understand things by themselves. Later in European history, the idea became that if god (the Christian god by then) had given men reason, this was for them to figure out things without referring to "holy mysteries" and the like.

Today's ROI god means that you don't need to understand anything...

Denis

Paris, France

Every week, I receive credit offers in the mail. I am apparently supposed to run myself bankrupt to "support the french economy". I bet it is similar where you all live ...