What about Bob?; Lutz memo starts stirring things up at General Motors.(car racing)(Brief Article)

Focus groups? Overused and not reliable. Design? Undervalued and ``corporate criteria-ed to death.'' Content? Not at the expense of profit or shareholder value. So says Robert Lutz, freshly anointed product czar at General Motors, in a widely circulated memo titled ``Strongly Held Beliefs.''

The memo, leaked almost immediately to the media, created such a buzz throughout the world's biggest car company that CEO Richard Wagoner felt compelled to issue a statement saying, in essence but not in so many words, ``Go, Bob, Go.'' Lutz, Wagoner said, was hired to challenge the status quo and that's what his memo does. (To see the complete Lutz memo, go to autoweek.com.)

More than a half-decade of committee-laden ``brand management'' looks to be taking it on the chin as Lutz pressures the corporation to develop more exciting products in less time and at lower cost. ``A good planning process,'' the vice chairman for product development wrote less than a month after taking the helm, ``cannot robotically create a good future portfolio (of cars and trucks).''

Lutz, who declares his motto to be ``often wrong but seldom in doubt'' also assailed excessive democracy and ``consensus building'' as counterproductive and hailed the virtues of tension and conflict in the workplace.

He certainly generated some of the latter. Reaction to the memo, predictably, varies depending on its implications for the recipient.

``I've not met him personally, but we do, let's say, feel his presence,'' said one brand manager who seemed to hear the message as one that was primarily about cost cutting. From other points of view, the cost-reduction emphasis seemed less significant than Lutz's attempts to move GM toward inspired products with exciting design.

Lutz's influence, say insiders, has already amended the look of the next Corvette (due in 2004 as a 2005 model) and forced re-evaluation of the Lambda platform, which was to underpin a range of cars and minivans worldwide.