Know. People here really do like to read about where they live and their history. There is a real connection among people who grew up here, especially the ones who are several generations on. The relationship to the land, you know. Its great to be with you this afternoon. I hope you are doing well. Guest thank you, debbie. I hope you are, too triet host ibm. I enjoyed reading the book in the last week. Do and a member of the people in the book you wrote about but i wonder why did you write this book now . Guest well, its clearly something i couldnt have written while i was still actively employed by General Motors because some people either within General Motors or other Companies Might have taken offense but it was a book i always wanted to write because i have worked for a number of very interesting personalities and i felt people with a great deal of ability on one side but some very serious flaws on the other and the public if rarely ever gets an inside look at the overall behavior of some of these famous executives that they dread about. Host so what is your definition of leadership especially in business . What do you look for in a good leader . Guest the most important prerequisite is an absolute sense of integrity because if that isnt fair then Everything Else is built on the house of cards but you also look for a healthy degree of selfconfidence. There has to be some ego. You cant have a retiring shy person who likes to defer to other people. Thats not possible. It has to be somebody with some command presence. A leader also has to obviously have a decent interpersonal skills but must have the ability to communicate because the leader cant say do this and dont ask why just do it because i say so. Thats not an effective form of leadership. A much better form of leadership is to use the power of verbal or written communications to pave the vision that everybody wants to follow and once youve got all the troops mobilized wanting to go in the same direction as you do then it becomes pretty easy. Host i read this book a couple of times preparing to talk about this today with you and i honestly is trying to figure not who was the most effective leader and did you have a favorite and i had a difficult time because you did give both pluses and minuses of the scoring you did at the end of the book but who do you think the most effective leader was the you worked with in the Auto Industry claques guest the most effective leader i worked with in the Auto Industry i have to say for all its worth, for all of its profanity and for all the down sides to him was without a question leave. Host why . Did you learn things from him . Guest well, i learned a lot of good things. Hopefully not many bad things, but he was passionate about the company, passionate about staging of this inner passion and in your drive that of course is another hallmark of good leaders. They have to be enthusiastic about the task and they have to be able to convey that enthusiasm. He was a brilliant communicator and also on good days he was off his game a little bit but on good days he could listen to a very, very complex multifaceted business problem and listen to everybody talking and after about 30 minutes he would say wait a minute five think ive got this figured out and then he would lay out an impeccable stepbystep plan. There were other days when seemingly obvious problems seemed to skate them and he was also at times i would say overly driven by the sense of ego and people need to defer to him and figuratively speaking of course and he was often somewhat asia ayman especially in the company of others that he didnt know. But overall take the weaknesses and the positives and he was in a highly effective and a visible leader who could rally the troops not only in house that he could get the beavers behind him and use all the brilliant job that he did with the u. S. Congress during the days of the chrysler loan guarantees. Believe me there was a tough sale. Host i agree with you she was loved and respected. I was trying to figure out who you least respected. Who in your career or life did you least respect and why . Guest . I never worked with him directly but he was the ceo, chairman and ceo of the corporation at the time was the producer of the lead acid batteries and i succeeded him as the ceo of the company. I just uncovered the biggest possible can of worms. He was in violation of many state and federal laws found guilty of racketeering. There wasnt only a lack of integrity but also a colossal ego, self dealing. This man shouldnt have been in the position of responsibility in any Large Organization but again he possessed some of the treats good leaders have which is the enormous degree of selfconfidence, the command. He looked like a leader and sound like a leader and used the vocabulary of leadership and people were persuaded by him and they did follow him and they were fooled by him so he was somebody that possessed the skill set but didnt possess the moral or the efik requirements to be a leader and he eventually dragged the company down because when i took over it was almost impossible for me to do business with certain companies. I couldnt entertain walmart as a customer even though they would potentially would buy seven or 8 million batteries a year but they would say im sorry but we are not going to deal with a company where the former ceo is headed for the federal penitentiary erie. So i found that a lot of doors i couldnt raise equity because the company was still under indictment in federal states several states. This was a guy whose personal greed and willingness to cheat and lie to achieve his goals actually destroyed the company and drove it into chapter 11. Host i think you did right by the week. But me ask you this question. Why did you talk about at the end of the book you have a scoring metric system that we need to have things in metrics. Talk about that a little so that people understand what the metrics are. I dont think people who know you very well would think if you as an encounter or metric seoul. I think youve got passion. Guest i am not. And of course, debbie, when first of all the set of leadership attributes are my ellinwood and i dont claim that they are complete. Other people might have others. But i think i have a fairly comprehensive list. Secondly, the importance or the waiting of the leadership skills i mean, to be honest, some people might not attach it as a highly waiting to integrity. Others might attach a greater leading to the creativity. I think that it depends both. I gave the disclaimer i said these ratings are subjective. They are the way that i see it other people might have different weights. But i wanted to let the end of the book i wanted people to have an opportunity to kind of see an effort ebenefits subject if qualification. I wanted them to see some sort of qualified way of assessing who is best, who is second best, who is third best and i wanted to encourage people to do a Self Assessment or assessment the present leaders. He will probably recall at some point in the book i said those individuals who have worked for me at any of the companys i worked for i certainly would welcome them filling out the same forms on me and sending it back because you are basically never too old to learn. Host why dont we use this as a chance to talk about the Business Assessment and talk about yourself as a leader. What do you think some of the leaders thought about having you as a team member . Some chose you and it looks like a few might not have. What do you think of yourself as a leader using that . Guest well, i dont classify myself as an articulating i classify myself as articulate because i can describe what i want, i can describe a division i can get people enthusiastic. And i was always very passionate about the business i was in the. Thanks to my training in the marine corps and also my early training in General Motors and leader in ford, the large american Automobile Companies, i had i think a pretty impeccable sense of Business Ethics what you do and what you dont do. And so on the integrity front, i passed. I certainly think any creative person. So i found it easy to come up with new ideas and new solutions to old problems so i give myself a high score on that. I think i was a better leader than i was subordinate because i found i had a lifelong problem of not being able to tolerate fools gladly and at times i was in working for a leader who was behaving in a particularly strange fashion i didnt always keep it to myself and of course one of liberals you should observe as a subordinate is you maintain loyalty to your leader and you should not openly criticize that leader in the presence of others and thats one that i occasionally violated so i mark myself down on that one. Host one of the things that struck me in reading your book is an organization can become a bureaucratic institution but can from dampen the inspiration. I dont think you ever let that happen to yourself. But how and to you and how the leaders ensure the doesnt happen . Guest well let basically this is where i say good leaders, really good leaders are often in patient, they are often harbinger rita cosby leader the always listens to every one, always listens to all the viewpoints wants to make sure that everybody is convinced before he or she finally makes a decision you just lose valuable time and i think a good leader does have a sense of impatience, is impatient in long meetings where people make contributions to demonstrate their knowledge as opposed to the cause of the meeting. A lot of leaders then by late Good Management behavior in that they say stop talking about that, please we heard it before. The only thing you can do this to say just keep quiet. We need to get this over with. Well, you know that is unpleasant to hear. It has fewer and anxiety in the meeting. But both leaders are focused on getting the job done. And they are focused on getting it done fast. You can have a very pleasant environment absent about leadership, but not as much gets done. And i think that you and i both know it samples of eight leadership style that was overly patient, overly tolerant up whether the opinions and finally it was too slow moving. But a good leaders just run roughshod over that. Host i agree with that. You were allowed to share your impatience more than i was. But me ask a different question to and how do you encourage to the leaders encourage great thinking and how do those ideas come forward and be heard in an organization . Guest yeah, i dont think anybody ever completely solved that. But certainly one way you do it is by espousing new and Different Solutions to yourself. Secondly, so people say this guy certainly thinks outside of the box. Maybe thats okay. You definitely encourage other people to think out of the box. And you reward people who think out of the box even though the idea may not pan out the first time. Eddy and above all, when people try something out of the box and it doesnt work you dont punish them. I will just tell you a little off 32nd story. Two engineers at chrysler when i was there it took a company car home with them because they felt they could make some modifications to where you could shift the fourspeed automatic transmission with a little switch, which is now known as the top shift. Every car has got it. The successful we did that and they were able to demonstrate. But chrysler now for the cost of 10 a car they could introduce a manually shiftable automatic transmission. When the organization heard about it was immediately how dare you do unauthorized work on a company car. Who authorized you to take the car with you . Who authorized this work . Do you realize you did on authorized damage to a company car and the whole weight of the bureaucracy was about to descend on them and they were going to be squashed like maggots. I found out about it and i said wait a minute to these kids had their own initiative and did something every Automobile Company in the world has tried to do, General Motors, ford, nobody has done it yet. They figured out a lowcost way to get the owner to shift the automatic transmission. They finally wound up giving them that chairman spry is and i think if you do that sort of thing once or twice. The word gets out and then what you find is all of the innovative people in the organization who prior to that have sort of concord down they come out of the woodwork and start making contributions. Host i need to ask a question that the United States government could use help on. Like so many appropriations that have been successful for decades and hundreds of years have gone into the large bureaucratic organizations that do squash and become much more that are authorized to take the car home than the creativity. What is your solution to the government and bureaucracy and how do you get rid of the bureaucracies that come into the existing organizations that have been successful at lasting but are not successful in innovation creativity etc. It is a problem still facing a lot of american businesses. It is facing a lot of American Communities and we saw what happened to detroit where over time we have built in apparatus, an administrative apparatus with its revenues. I was just talking to the consultant about a Major American Corporation facing headwinds and a decline in revenue and a decline in the margins. They are also reluctant to reach in and take the medicine that is going to take the right side of the company. Basically what it takes is somebody who doesnt try to solve ive always found it so amazing in the government when there is a new problem instead of asking your existing organization to deal with this new problem expands the scope and the new department is formed. So weve got departments all over the place. Many of them operating across purposes i dont know how many Intelligence Services we have, but a lot of corporations believe the same way. You will remember that General Motors under the socalled go Fast Initiative that is supposed to be a spontaneous flow of little ideas that can be quickly adopted to streamline the organization or to make the tasks easier. Now as it happened, the ceo wanted to know how many were occurring for rot company, who was creating it, what departments on how fast were they being processed, how many were adopted. So the huge parallel bureaucracy was built up around to go Fast Initiative which was designed to eliminate bureaucracy. The was the ultimate irony and i see all of the Large Organizations doing that pitted a well create a new bureaucracy to solve the problems of the old bureaucracy and of course the old bureaucracy doesnt want its problems solved. The only way to cut through that is that its got to be either external sectors like chapter 11, which unfortunately would be a great way to Fix Companies if it were not for the fact that shareholders get wiped out but its under the leadership going to emerge with a realistic tax base heretofore Public Services privatized etc. , etc. And certainly it is true for General Motors and for chrysler and its true for all of American Companies. Governments are going to require i hate to say this, but its going to require a chief executive who is not consensus driven but it is very much focused on streamlining the government and reducing the size of Big Government and forcing a lot of nice to have people out of the Government Service and encouraging them to find jobs somewhere else. But again, this gets back to my comment on leadership that a highly effective leader that is facing a difficult or seemingly intractable situation cannot wait around for everyone to agree with what he or she is doing. At some point thats why he or she is the leader to force change. Its going to take somebody in government to really force the change to say i dont care about this. We need this, we dont need that. We can consolidate that or hand out tasks to everybody and tell everybody that everybody is going to get rid of 25 to 30 of the people. You figure out. Im not going to tell you how to do it but its going to take Something Arbitrary like that. And of course is it an unpleasant task . Yes. With the person get heavily criticized . Will there be negative press . Yes. What he or she likely be voted out of office the next time around . Again yes. That is why he is so difficult to do. So instead of actually tackling the problem, most of leaders in the government kick the can down the road and say this is something we are really going to have to address some day and then a lot of these people find comfort in doing longrange plans and the longrange plans are usually five years out and designed to show a well addressed problem in a few years and heres how we plan to do it. But meanwhile the revenue will pick up and we will be okay. I have seen in my career i have seen hundreds of those plans which we get rid of the feelgood. They all go home at night and they are tired. Theyve worked on this long range plan would that a mistake for doing something about the problem. Once the longrange plan is finished and its put to bed then everybody says we fixed that one and of course they havent fixed a fame. Host i call it kind of the program the issuer. There was always a new phrase that could be used and then things would come in and im not sure that any of them really made a difference. Did any of them make a difference to you . We agree on that, too. All of these seven initiatives of this and that, and there was the program will and they were usually sold to the company by what consultants and i think one of them on the american side of the industry and the Human Resource professionals as grant be sending me a bunch of angry emails on this one. But Human Resources in the United States has almost become a cancerous growth on the side of the american industry in that humanresources were who keep their personal records and make sure they get paid and serve the right ones up further raises periodically. The Human Resources are expanded into all kind of programs, just married programs and they grow and they grow and they grow and they are the instigators of many of these enormously timeconsuming bureaucracy creating new initiatives that everybody has to pretend to believe in and then usually books are handed out that everybody has to read and its a colossal waste of time. I saw a lot of that at chrysler and a lot of that at ford. You and i both saw more than we wanted to see at General Motors. I think if humanresources were either out sourced or cut down back to their basic functions of keeping the personnel records and making sure people get paid and the promotional increases take place i think we would all be a lot better off because work been the actually alleviate. You and i both remember what was it, the Performance Management system at General Motors, the Performance Management program where we would spend literally hours or days developing next years goals and quantifying them all and then checking them against other peoples goals and having big meetings to make sure that everybodys goals were consistent with everybody else. And then when it was all done you would put it in a desk drawer and never look at it again. Host you speak the truth and thats what youre trying to do in this book about leadership but it begs the question i was right to have to ask that sometimes when going to ask it now, which is you dont have any Women Leaders in the book and im curious about what you think about the women as leaders and what you think of them as being part of your team and why does the iowa industry still have a Glass Ceiling for women at all . Guest several female read yours of the book have said well this guy is obviously sexist because he doesnt deal with a single female leader. The reason i didnt is that i never had a female superior so there was just an opportunity that i messed. Mauney career was mostly in the days before women achieve any sort of significant promotions. So i mean, its just not my fault. Its other peoples fault for not having promoted when an early enough so that i could report to them. Having said that, i think all in all what do i think of them house leaders . I think they are highly effective as leaders, not all of them, but a good female leaders are highly effective. I would have to look at National Leaders like Margaret Thatcher or of israel or so forth. So we have numerous examples of highly effective female leaders in politics and to be certain extent in the industry looking at General Motors i dont think we cant really complain of a Glass Ceiling at gm anymore. And number of officers are female now and of course the executive Vice President for the Public Development and certainly often spoken of as a candidate to succeed daniel axson of General Motors and then the Ford Motor Company whose name escapes me now but i will make this prediction. I would say that within five to six years at the latest one of the large Automobile Companies will have a ceo. Host could you think it took someone coming in from outside of the industry to start to appreciate the value of the women and do you think that this recent trend in the last five to ten years of bringing people in from outside of the industry has been something the industry needed to get it shaken up a little . Yes, i do. I think in the case of General Motors i think that rick wagner was very open to a female leader and wanted to see them promoted as fast as possible and willing to take what a willing to push female leaders pretty fast one and maybe even take a little risk and pushed them faster than we would normally say they were ready for so there is no problem there but it was really deanne at person who made what i consider the boldest move for product development. The broad question is do i think it was good to bring outsiders in . Because we have outsiders in all three American Companies now you have Chrysler Jeep and forward and danjac person at gm. I was always of the feeling that an automated ceo should have an automotive background because you needed to understand the industry and make the right judgments so i would revise my opinion on that. What i think is the most important is for them on automotive experience ceo to be possessed obviously of good leadership skills, but to have the judgment to be able to listen to the right people. As allen recently said somebody asked him you were not an automotive person how did you know what to do to fix for . He said i didnt have a clue about what to do to fix for. But all of the ideas on fixing ford were right there with my people. These were people that had been held down, havent been listened to but i listened to them and their ideas made sense to me like a Global Product Development which General Motors took me from the time i got to gm in 2001 to 2005 to get a Global Product Development implemented as opposed to each continent doing their own cars which is so wasteful. Allen got to ford and he asked some of the people whats wrong with the way we do business and somebody said gm just converted to the Global Product Development that is what we should do. We are doing duplicate cars all over the world it makes no sense whatsoever. He said why dont we do it . There is resistance from the europeans and the latin americans. He said lets have a big meeting and talk about it and we will make a decision. He hadnt been there for three weeks when he made the decision to go to Global Product Development. So i could give you a similar examples that i observed with the judgment and common sense. So why better than the seas and automotive professional . Because most of the seas and automotive professionals had 30 years of training of running by the numbers one, doing all of the product plans laid out with the cost targets and investment targets and weight of return target and only doing the ones with a higher rate of return and was basically the counter of excellence and a lot of times product excellence suffered. All we know is General Motors used to make not a very appealing cars and we were losing money. Now we are making highly desirable cars that cost more to make but we are making money. Is the right . Right. Then why would we change . Lets just keep doing great cars the best we know how with a lot of content and a lot of technology and a lot of quality. And this was a lesson to be trained for the year veterans of the automobile business for not. This is not a business like it doesnt matter, restaurant business, food business it doesnt matter its always the same. If you run your plan targeting to make as much money as possible and you express everything in mauney so if we spend this much on the product and take 2 out what and then add a little margin and then we sell it for this much, why in five years we could have the stock at 100. Ive been to basilian meetings like that. We never talk about what you have to do for the customer to get to those numbers. The philosophy has always followed and most businessmen follow this is satisfy the customer, get the product right, get a better than competition if you can and the money will follow because profitability is a reward for giving the job right. Its not a godgiven thing you can put down on the spread sheet and then manage the rest of the business to get that profit. So i think both day and actor sam and allen are the businessmen . Sure. Do they care about the bottom line . Of course they do. But they want to get to the bottom line by producing excellent products that the customer is willing to pay for. Host building on that why did the of the industry given to a near collapse . Is it just that they were not building the project squawks. Did they have any responsibility for what happened . I will start with the last one first. The response of the city for what happened . Sure. I probably wasted money here and there and caused the creation of some cars were versions of the cars that turned out not to sell as well as i thought they were going to do. But as Wayne Gretzky says, the famous hockey player you miss 100 of the shots and all and all i think my batting average of success to failure is probably what i will make a bold statement with. Probably not many people can equal my batting average for the success versus failures in the product that they helped create was what we just talked about earlier. This almost institutionalized do everything through the bureaucracy, dont take any risks, dont accept the obvious, study everything then study it again. If you dont like the way that it comes out, study it one more time and have all of these departments and subgroups and initiatives that absolutely had no Customer Value but we are a Large Organization and we are going to behave like a Large Organization. We are going to have the staff like a Large Organization and people kind of see the executives often see the role as overseeing this huge apparatus successfully as opposed to creating the Customer Value as their primary goal. And as i said in my book, i really do put a lot of the blame on the u. S. Business schools in the way the business graduates are taught in this country. Host let me ask you a different question as you read the book you didnt necessarily like everybody that you worked with. Do you as a leader have to like the people you are working with and if you dont, how do you keep it from poisoning in organization . Guest well, i think a good leader he may or may not like the people that hes got, but he or she should try to hide that, try your best not to play favorites. Playing favorites is what destroyed is the situation. If you have a situation and i was there a few times in my career where every time i opened my mouth fell leader would say there you go again look we are not interested in your opinion. And then some yes, maam, some well tailored to give it competent on the other side of the table what sort of an eco the bosss views expressed slightly differently and then all kinds of smiles and praise be heaped on him and i found that absolutely sickening and that does tend to destroy the morale in an organization. So try not to play favorites. Is it going to be nasty be nasty with everyone. If youre going to be nice and funny i always try to inject a lot of humor into meetings because i felt it listen to everybody and you got a Better Exchange of ideas. But you have to be consistent and again, the most important thing is dont play favorites. Treat everybody the same. And a lot of good coaches of sports teams are extremely tough. But yet they somehow manage to convey to the players that they are being taught for a reason. They are being tough on him because they want the team to win. A good leader does a good thing and an organization. Hes tough but people know he is not being tough because hes a saddest hes been tough because he wants the company to win. Host good advice. Most leaders at sometime in their career have to deal with conflicting priorities. How do you choose what is the priority that is going to drive the business decision ultimately . Guest thats a good question. Part of the General Motors process where we all like to write down the goal is there are a lot of conflicting goals on there and i think of course the leaders of the organizations are faced with the conflict although time. Longterm success means we shouldnt do this right now or short term success says like Quarterly Earnings makes the stock look good, make the stock go up all the options become more valuable etc. Etc. But its been to hurt us in the long terms of a longterm shortterm goal conflict is there all the time. In the loved other times there are conflicts. One of the famous ones in the automobile business is the cost versus quality. You spend 15 more per car putting in added rustproofing more sound dancing or better quality bearing . And really often what in the past, and most with the overemphasis on the cost and the american Automobile Industry in the old days when there was the conflict between quality and cost quality was always be prioritized and said well if this is the end of last 30,000 miles by then will be out of warranty any way and its not meant to cost us anything whereas if we put in the better berings, we know thats quite cost 2 a car. So most of the decisions tended to be driven towards cost. I think of the good of leaders can look beyond that and the visionary leaders like the people we have running the business now will say quality is free. You may be investing a little bit in the car right now, but the downstream effect on Customer Loyalty and resale value absent the warranty cost and absent a recall etc. , etc. Will more than pay for the added quality that we are putting in the car. You have to adopt that as an act of faith because you cant prove it with members. But we good leaders are able to make those tradeoffs and the smart leaders will make those tradeoffs in the direction of what longterm results in other words this is why Many Private Companies do better than Public Companies because privately Held Companies where granddad and the the sun and the kids all own the business they can make the decision of whats not be a foolishly in the short term because we want to build a company. Public companies are under unbelievable pressure for shortterm results all the time and its one of the things that tends to hold them back. But the good leader will when faced with these he will let his moral compass be his guide. What is really better here . Shortterm Cost Reduction our Customer Satisfaction . What is better . Shortterm Quarterly Earnings reports that looks good and next quarter we are going to have to explain why we are down but meanwhile we will look like heroes . He would say lets not do any funny business this quarter and the business soundly and we will have a good progression next quarter so they make those intuitively but they tend to be guided as opposed to putting up a short term smokescreen host what is the one mistake of the leaders make the most that he would caution someone in leadership to be aware of . Guest well, i think the largest mistake that i certainly witnessed with most of the leaders ive worked for is having to great of faith in the numerical analysis because one they will take a fiveyear sales projection or five new revenue projection or five year projection of health care costs, they will take the five year projection of the price per barrel of oil and so forth and accept that as gospel and then because they got it from one of the great departments thats supposed to create these numbers and, you know when i joined General Motors in 1963i worked in one of those departments. I was a socalled a Senior Analyst and i know at the end of the day when you filter all the way down through the layers of management and you get to the recent one who is actually doing those numbers a lot of it is i look at the sheet of paper and i say ten is too much, fiat is too little light and i will go with seven and a half. And then it goes up through the chain and by that time it gets to the ceo it as gospel and freddie believes in it. Ive looked at a lot of those analysis and ive always made myself popular in the meeting where wreck or somebody would say this is the analysis what do you think and i would say the only thing i can tell you is every Single Member on that, every Single Member on that spread sheet is wrong appear to get the leading we dont know is how wrong it is and what direction is it wrong. So to take a sense of comfort prepared by somebody else as opposed to letting their own experience, their own intuition and their own judgment to be the guide and some of the best leaders this is one of the things that lee iacocca was good at. They would start with a merkel presentation and what are you doing . We are here to show you. I dont want to see a bunch of alternatives. We know what we are going to do. We are going to do so and so. Good leaders cut through that stuff and that leaders far more consensus driven leaders tend to place far too great of importance on numerical analysis which at the end of today is exactly like my quantification at the end of the book where you so nicely pointed out and youre absolutely right you can argue with the weightings and the rankings and so forth because at the end of the day, numbers unless it is historical numbers but any future number is always the product of somebodys judgment. And the product of the judgment of the numbers in the large corporations usually the input is from lowlevel people that are fresh out of Business School that are very smart and have no experience in the business. So why would you believe those numbers . Host in Political Correctness he would say it is killing the government and bureaucracies and corporations. How would you deal with a very legitimate issues like when i worked at General Motors and this is a true story they said to me why would a woman want to work at General Motors . How do you help broaden the organizations to make them open and be aware of things they need to be and the same time not have Political Correctness for lack of a better word to kill for the ability to be productive . Guest we have to separate from of political 3 guest we have to separate from of Political Correctness putative i think the diversity programs and what was up until a few years ago and arguably still is a white maledominated culture is probably a good thing to sort of force open some opportunities. But to me that has nothing to do with Political Correctness. We are where Political Correctness become so absurd is when you are i was once hugely chastise and a meeting because we were talking about a female designer and house killed she is and it also happened that she is without question when of the most attractive ive ever seen in my whole life and i made the offhand comment i said shes extremely beautiful and i had used blasphemy in a church and the full weight of the h. R. And Senior Management came down upon me saying we dont comment on womens appearance any more. Excuse me but what is so negative about making a comment as long as we dont stay as long as you dont imply that she got to her position because of her beauty or os the position to her beauty but you fully recognize her talent and contribution to say by the way she is a very attractive woman. But any comment relating to someones appearance is now vanished from the lexicon in all Large Organizations. And at some point, debbie, Political Correctness and starts to infringe on the First Amendment. Because one that we are seeing is a network of do and dont and you can say this for you cant say that. And when you work your way through this Political Correctness what ever happened to the old First Amendment rights . Youre not even allowed to refer to them to extremely obese person has as anywhere. Somebody that is a 5 feet 11 woman at least 380 pounds, excuse me, she is fat. We can find euphemisms to say that she is queen size or larger Something Like that, but this total perversion of our language to avoid phrases or references that could conceivably be offensive to someone i think is wrecking a lot of things in this country. And if i were the dictator i would step in and fix it. Host you know youre going to have a lot of reaction to what you said. I would like to have a longer conversation than we can do in this because i think that there has been a lot over the years and it is not as simple as you make it. But there is a valid viewpoint expressed. How do you have a valid discussion is with having the discussion although i will tell you quite frankly i did experience discrimination problem almost my entire career. You didnt talk about that because of turkey was also but isnt as simple or it is not as complicated as people would like to make it easier. Guest im sure thats true to the mid she is both africanamerican and female and she had some great discrimination. And its close i dont think that has anything to do with the Political Correctness movement which is separate. Host we need to have this and we will. We only have a few minutes left and you have so much wisdom and great straightforward things to share with people. What would you do differently if you were starting your career over again or is their anything you do differently . Guest if i had been less critical of the way that the company is run, i might not have alienated as many as i did during my career and i might have risen to greater heights. But on the other hand then i tell myself i would have denied my own being. I would have denied my sense of critical analysis and my frustration with things not being as run as they could be. And i probably would first of all i would wind up being frustrated as opposed to being now happily retired. I think if i had denied my own personality and tried to be something that i wasnt i probably wouldnt have gotten as far as i did. As i look back at my time on chrysler i wish i had sometimes been a little less intemperate in my criticisms of the way that he was doing things that might have resulted in my elevation as a ceo of the chrysler corporation. But you never know. All in all 80 is what it is. Ive done it. I am happy with it. I look back on it or i look back on my career with mostly great satisfaction. Host i think most people would say that you have had a very successful career. Many would kill to be. Are you really mean time here . What is next for speed . Bob lutz . Guest i know when to be there at age 82. Im a contributor to forbes, cnbc contributor write a column for road and track magazine. I am a board member of a variety of companies. I do a couple that of consulting and i am now involved in producing premium mens watches one of which is right here. And we are also starting small the venture so why have plenty to keep me busy. Host i wouldnt call that retired. We have a couple of minutes left. You are someone with many thoughts and a lot of wisdom. Someone just starting out today they want to follow in your footsteps you have a lot to teach them. What would your parting words of wisdom be to some young person down male or female starting out on leadership . Guest i would say be passionate about what you do. If you are passionate about fashion or the furniture business or whatever, go into that. If youre passionate about the hospitality of business, go into that. I heard a lecture by a sports caster i forget his first name telling his life story people get from the time he could walk he would walk around holding a spoon and pretending to be a sports caster is what he wanted to be his whole life. So i think in the interest and in a passion for an essential ingredient otherwise you will wind up as a nine to five with slave and you will be successful so hard work. Try to exceed requirements to beat never be satisfied with a status quo. Always give a little extra. And of course always maintained absolute professional integrity. Dont try to pull funny stuff. Starting rumors or try to ingratiate yourself by shading the truth and so forth. Just be a for absolute integrity which is i think a lesson that America Needs to hear. Host you are great. You taught me a lot over the years. I think that we need more people who are willing to say what they think. So i hope people look for guest john is one of my heroes. Host i love you both. Guest john is one of my heroes for sure. Host i look forward to seeing you sarin and i hope people look forward to hearing your insight and wisdom. Bob lutz icons and idiots if you were there were idiots than icons. [laughter] guest thanks, debbie. That was said that a programmer in which authors the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, Public Policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. After words ears every weekend on book tv at 10 p. M. On saturday, 12 p. M. And 9 p. M. On sunday and 12 a. M. On monday. You can also watch after words on line. Go to booktv. Org and click on after words in the book tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. Of hos