Autos: Back on the Fast Track

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Few in Detroit gave Eaton's succession at Chrysler much chance at all. A career GM man, he had spent his recent years in Europe, well away from the turmoil and strife that had gripped his industry's hometown. He was something of a shotgun compromise in Chrysler's boardroom showdown between Iacocca and president Bob Lutz, and in the view of some skeptics, mainly lucked out in grabbing the prize after all the hard work had been done. Eaton arrived alone, brought in none of his deputies (not even his secretary) and fired no one. In Chrysler's recent history, it was a sure sign of either meekness or madness.

Eaton could have easily become the short-term resident that many expected, including those young tigers who had devoted themselves to Lutz's leadership. Eaton stayed, and not incidentally, so did Lutz, becoming a team that has healed the rift and continued to build on the company's momentum. Eaton turned out to be a morale-building coach among a number of individual stars. "I don't believe in one-man shows," says Eaton. "But my style is very, very persistent in pushing for things I think are right. I was surprised at how far along everyone was toward working as a team. That's exactly my style."

No one personifies Detroit's new culture more engagingly than GM's Jack Smith, who has dispensed with nearly all the trappings of solemn power collected by his predecessors, including the dining room. He has even dropped the chairman's Christmas speech, once beamed to GM's faithful around the world. A senior executive says one reason may be the unforgettable scene in the cruelly funny film Roger and Me of Roger Smith reading from Dickens' A Christmas Carol while autoworkers were being evicted from their homes in Flint, Michigan.

Instead of closeting himself in his corner 14th-floor suite in Detroit headquarters, Smith spends most of his 12- and 14-hour days in his modest office at GM's technical center in Warren, 15 miles away. His goal is to convert the research center into the core of GM's new-product operations by bringing together such specialists as chassis, brake and electrical engineers to form platform teams for launches.

Though his task is awesome and he clearly has a very long way to go to clean up the world's largest and most stultifying corporate bureaucracy, Smith's management style is already showing through. The General Motors that used to trumpet each minor fix in its operations as if it were the second Industrial Revolution is reinventing itself with little fanfare. Smith has slashed the number of bureaucrats at GM's Pentagonian headquarters from 13,000 to fewer than 2,000. "There were duplicating functions all over the place," he says. "Basically, they were just checking up on what was going on elsewhere."

Another Smith innovation: "creativity teams." These relatively small groups of 4,000 comprise younger managers across the company in more than 300 areas, from flywheels to door handles, and are charged with coming up with new ways of thinking about such things as prices, quality and worldwide purchasing. Says Bob Burkhart, a senior purchasing executive delegated by Smith to oversee the creativity groups: "Whenever we used to see a roadblock, we'd hide, duck or find a way to do other things and not get beat up. Now our youngest people are being empowered to challenge the status quo."