John DeLorean – The Dangers of Unchecked Entrepreneurship

John DeLorean – The Dangers of Unchecked Entrepreneurship

Before the technology giants of today, the automotive industry, a looming and monopolistic industry paved the way for manufacturing and innovation. Eventually, General Motors (GM), Ford, and Chrysler would come to define an entire century rich with innovation. At the center of it were the core lynchpins of engineering and process management: Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford, and a name not mentioned as often as deserved, but who was considered the Elon Musk of his time, John DeLorean.

A playboy, iconoclast, engineer, and overall ‘rebel’, DeLorean helped shape the future of the automotive industry using his charisma to inspire designs and engineering capabilities which would help to birth the muscle car era of the 1960s and 70s. What DeLorean represented, was entrepreneurship in its purest form – a man eventually willing to do whatever it would take to save his company and realize his stainless-steel vision. His charm and entrepreneurial spirit drove him from his leadership of GM to creating one of the most iconic vehicles, but his inability to harness and reflect on the repercussion associated with his actions led to his eventual fall from grace. This is the story of unchecked entrepreneurship, and why we should always reflect on the actions we take when building a business.

The Rebel At GM

DeLorean always saw himself as separate from traditional management, even from his time at General Motors he was known as a renegade executive. Casually wearing a Leather Jacket, open buttoned shirt, and jeans while attending meetings in stark contrast to the stifling 3-piece suit corporate culture of GM. This attitude is reflected in his work. As the head of Pontiac, he oversaw the reinvention of the brand from a blue-haired version of the Chevrolet into a muscle car by leading the design of the Pontiac GTO using clever marketing and design choices.

But his time at GM and his rise to the presidency was cut short when, in response to the public’s demand for a more compact car and the rise of the Ford Pinto, he led the Vega project. He would later lament his time at Chevrolet in “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors” the car’s complete lack of quality engineering led to multiple issues on the test track. Further in the book, he described the GM bureaucracy, a near-monopoly over the automotive empire willing to engage in unethical practices to remain profitable.

GM was too big to fail, and its design by committee attitude and slipping standards frustrated DeLorean. But, as we will later see, he would also fall victim to similar issues at DMC. As he would go on to say:

Leadership and innovation are impossible. – John DeLorean

The DeLorean Motor Company (DMC)

Following his departure from GM in the early 70s (or ejection due to his outspoken nature about the company), DeLorean began working on his next project and founded DMC. Working with multiple government organizations, specifically in the UK, he secured a large loan valued close to £100 million to build a state-of-the-art factory in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. His dream was to design an affordable, yet luxurious sports car that was fuel-efficient and aesthetically pleasing. The gull-wing doors were a staple of this vision. DeLorean had spent years promoting his car through ads to “Live The Dream – Today” and allowed dealerships who sold his car to have a percentage stake in the overall company.

This process overcame multiple production hurdles, specifically linked to delays and financing, DeLorean’s first DMC-12 rolled off the Dunmurry assembly line in 1981. While DeLorean continued to tout the car’s capabilities, its 0-60MPH time, and its aesthetic qualities, the largely untrained workforce along with the conflicts in Northern Ireland further delayed the ability for DeLorean to ramp up production. By 1982, these factors along with a changing political climate in the UK, recalls and repairs, alleged embezzlement, along with negative press over DMC’s single product began to take their toll on the company.

This led DeLorean to take extreme measures to save his company.

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DeLorean saw his company as his ability to express his design and engineering talents to create something great. This is reflected in the urgency he expressed attempting to save the company. He flew and met with multiple potential investors and leveraged the network he built as a celebrity to attempt to salvage his company’s finances with new investors. In the end, he fell prey to his ego and his inability to compromise – and was caught in a sting operation by the FBI attempting to sell millions of dollars of cocaine in a last ditch attempt to save his company. The embarrassment he would have felt, as GM watched his company collapse, waned so intensely on his psyche he resorted to unethical and illegal activities to try to save it. 

Upon his arrest, DMC quickly collapsed like a house of cards, and the factory was held together by a skeleton crew. 1983 would be the last year the DeLorean was rolled off the factory floor. DeLorean would later joke when trying to restart his business, “Would you buy a used car from me?” Even still, he began making plans for his third comeback.

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship

This comeback was to be based solely on an upgraded version of the DMC-12, but it never materialized, and DeLorean lost everything. In his last public speeches and appearances, he continued in the months before his death promising a resurgence in his company, his designs, and his vision of the automotive future.

It’s inevitable that the company comes back. – John DeLorean

His book “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors”, no longer in print, highlighted a considerable amount of the management issues present within the company. Even choosing to delve into the details of the rushed design and development of the Chevrolet Vega, GM’s answer to the looming fuel crisis and the need for compact cars of the 1970s. Similar to Greek tragedies, DeLorean would ultimately become a victim of the same issues he identified.

For a man who wanted more than anything to be the next Enzo Ferrari, running multiple divisions of GM and DMC, his life would end rather quietly. Shunned from his business circles, he moved into a small condo in Morristown, NJ where he would pass away in 2005. At his funeral, he was laid to rest in a motorcycle jacket and blue jeans. Defiant until the end. He never gave up hope on a company resurgence, and even sold watches and memoirs to finance his next venture.

Unchecked, an entrepreneur may fall into this trap and do ‘whatever it takes’ to accomplish their goals, regardless of legality or ethics. DeLorean represents those raw qualities of an entrepreneur we love and hate: untamed, charismatic, narcissistic, brilliant, and uncompromising. Even with these traits, he eventually came to embody everything he hated about General Motors and all those stuffy and self-congratulatory board room members.

But, as we as entrepreneurs continue to grow, the case of DMC and John DeLorean can be used as a cautionary metaphor for business ethics and unchecked egos: that if we do not take active measures now and evaluate our actions, we may eventually become what we despise.

Image Credits: Getty Images & Considerable.com

Ascend with Atlassian: 2021 Government Symposium

Ascend with Atlassian: 2021 Government Symposium

What is the Atlassian Government Symposium?

The Atlassian Government Symposium is an event held annually that allows government teams to connect, share, and learn how to take Agile work concepts and integrate them into their practices. As a certified Atlassian training partner, Ascend Integrated presented two projects during the symposium that showcased the unique benefits of government teams adopting Atlassian-based Agile solutions.

Merging Security and Efficiency

James Hunt, the lead Atlassian Expert, and Jeff Weatherford, the lead DevSecOps engineer for Ascend Integrated, discussed deploying Atlassian as a shared service across Platform One for the Department of Defense.

The give and take between most secure programming and ease of use amongst government teams has been a difficult balance to strike for many. 

The solution, in this case, was the creation of a common environment for the team to use, built on preapproved hardened containers. By working in an environment that is already approved as safe and configured for government team members to use, there is a reduction in required communication for work to be completed and an increase in the efficiency of workflow.

Finally, a marriage of security and functionally exists that allows for a reduction in the bureaucratic processes that dictates when work that needs to be done is able to be accomplished.  The efficiency improvement of these processes can be tracked and scaled using Atlassian software.

Planning for Success with Advanced Roadmaps

Shaun Jones, Chief Operational Officer of Ascend Integrated gave a keynote speech on how using Jira Roadmaps can make government project managers more effective. “Urgency plays a role in achievement…it’s in the planning where we win or lose.” Jones said. The need for managers to create an environment that reduces blockages to their team’s productivity remains apparent.

Advanced Roadmaps is a Jira add-on which uses existing data to create long-term planning visualizations. Planning using Jira Roadmaps gives project managers the tools to see what is occurring at all levels of team activity. It adds functionality through the use of dependency chains which create an organizational hierarchy.

This is an ideal add-on for real-time planning to occur and it can be integrated for use with Confluence for contextual messaging. The beauty of roadmaps is the simplicity of use by allowing a full scope of an organizations work to be viewed in one single source location. This allows managers to view and share bottlenecks with team members or clients before they occur, ultimately minimizing or avoiding them.

By having a system that allows users at all levels to understand and interact with data that helps quantify the expectation of project completion, project managers and team members are able to communicate more effectively. The level of granularity related to objective completion, task completion, and project completion is a valuable guide in helping team members and project managers visualize where progress is being blocked. Transparency of work processes helps to reduce the dissonance in communication between team members.

Scaling processes are made most effective when communication is fluid and data is easily visualized. Utilizing Atlassian software can help bridge the gap between stunted project growth and streamlining the technical capacity of your team. Ascend Integrated can implement these processes through delivering sustainable IT solutions.