You make a strong case. I do worry a bit, however. Keeping the spark of top-tier engineering focus alive in the day-to-day press of managing costs and other business dimensions is a very difficult act to pull off.
Every one of the Detroit Big Three lost its way when finance people moved into the corner offices. Cadillac, for example, went from being one of the premiere technology innovators in the industry to being the running joke that produced the Cimarron. Pontiac, once the sporting division of GM, became known as the plastic-body-cladding division. Chrysler became a vinyl and velour emporium with risible product quality that still plagues it today. The Ford Mustang went from prancing pony to wallowing pig and excrescences such as the 4-banger turbocharged Thunderbird raised their ugly heads.
GE, at first supercharged when Jack Welch took the stage with innovative thinking about organization dynamics and product research-and-development, evolved in his later tenure into a finance engine and cost-cutting house. The executives he groomed near the end of his tenure as potential successors earned their place on the roster largely by their effectiveness at cost cutting -- and all went on to flop. Jeff Immelt, who won the race to take over GE, instituted cost-cutting at GE Medical that looked great for a few years but spawned quality issues that eventually opened the door for Siemens to replace it as the preferred imaging equipment supplier to the global medical community. And we all know where GE is now -- what there is left of it, anyway. Bob Nardelli, who slashed and burned his way through GE Power Systems but lost the CEO race to Immelt, moved on to Home Depot where his cost-cutting efforts cost them market share and him his job in fairly short order. Jim McNerney, another CEO finalist and management efficiency guru went on to lackluster tenures at 3M and Boeing. And Dave Calhoun -- who might have won the CEO race at GE had he stayed until the end -- is now infamous as the cost-slasher and stock price pumper who brought once-mighty Boeing to its knees.
In a world where investors want engineering-intensive and heavy-industry concerns such as automakers to dance, pop, and sparkle in the marketplace like digital tech firms, keeping engineering at the forefront is all too often a doomed effort.
So . . . I worry that Rawlinson's departure from Lucid barely two products in, while perhaps eventually becoming advisable, might have come too soon.
