21st Century Auto Management

The Harvard Business Blog offers 6 key rules for 21st Century auto industry survival:

Choose good. In the 21^st century, every moral imperative is also a strategic imperative: doing good - for customers, employees, suppliers, or society - is a radical strategic choice that unlocks new pathways to innovation and growth. The opportunity cost of defending evil for Detroit was never learning how to choose good - and that's a crucial mistake other auto players didn't make. Tata chose to make a car that was accessible to the world's poor. Porsche and BMW chose to invest in talent, people, and imagination. Honda and Toyota chose to invest in renewables and partnerships with the public sector. All opened new avenues to growth for an industry at the brink of extinction.

Purpose is self-interest. The 21^st century demands a more enlightened self-interest: one factoring in a longer timescale, fuller contingencies, and an honest and broad consideration of hidden and unintended consequences to people, society and the environment. When we understand all that, have begun to develop a purpose - a way in which we will change the world radically for the better. By confusing selfishness with self-interest, Detroit vaporized it's own purpose - and will stay trapped in a wilderness of economic meaninglessess until it rediscovers it.

Get constructive. True 21^st century businesses can be judged in the blink of an eye: how intensely do they put the "co" in constructive? Can they let demand spark and fuel co-creation, can they co-produce from a pool of shared resources, are they capable of letting value activities be co-managed, are they tuned to cooperate? Detroit can't get constructive because it's spent the better part of a century playing the games of destructive strategy.

Seek difference. Ultimately, the problem is simple: differentiation is about perception. Difference is about reality. People in the 21^st century aren't the zombified, braindead consumers of the 20^th century. And so the 21^st century demands not mere differentiation - a bean counters' eye view of the world if ever there was one - but true difference. True difference is built by making different choices from the ground up - different in the very essence of the value activities that make the wheels of production and consumption spin. Porsche and BMW strove for difference - not mere differentiation - and it is that choice that is at the heart of their global leadership of the automotive sector.v

Seek crisis. By insulating themselves from real-world economic pressures, boardrooms also dilute and sap incentives for innovation and renewal. Detroit wasn't innovating because the opportunity cost of strategy as gamesmanship was, ultimately, foregoing innovation itself. In the 21^st century, gamesmanship - and its attendant dilution of incentives - is a sure path to near terminal strategy decay. Forget Detroit - just ask big music, big pharma, or big food.

Advantage happens for. Competitive advantage against bears a striking resemblance to simply bullying. Bullying is easy: just as in the sandbox, any boardroom with market power can jack up margins by forcing others - buyers, suppliers, consumers, society - to bear costs. But if every corporation across the economy is playing that game, the economy's just a game of musical chairs.