Detroit tries to disrupt itself
GM beat the Model 3 to market by a full year with the all-electric Chevy Bolt. Hollis Johnson
The scrappy companies that were undertaking the disruption, of course, could go all out on the effort. For them, there was no point in striving to survive—the only acceptable outcome was to make it big, to hit the jackpot, or to vanish completely.
In late 2015, I went to Detroit to interview GM CEO Mary Barra. The first woman to lead a major automaker, Barra said all the right things about how the 100-plus-year-old carmaker, and by association the industry that it was part of, would ride out all the new threats.
At GM headquarters in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, sitting in Barra’s large and gracefully appointed but far from ostentatious office, I listened as she accepted the deluge of risk that was sweeping through the industry. Barra had spent her entire life at GM—her father had worked there, and GM was the only place she had ever worked.
"I can’t tell you what technology is going to exist in five years," she said. "All I can tell you is that if we sit here five years from today, it will be something that’s dramatically impacted the industry that we can’t even name right now."
I thought I was being lightly irreverent when I said to Barra that I hoped we could make a date to talk again then. But although she was amused, she wasn’t prepared to make light of what she was up against.
"We’re going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves," she said, her voice unwavering after a nearly hourlong interview. "So we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday."
Ford’s Mark Fields unhesitatingly echoed Barra’s message. He came to Business Insider in March 2016, right before the New York auto show, and in an interview came right out with it. "There’s a lot of talk around technology companies disrupting the auto industry," he said. "Our approach is very simple: we’re disrupting ourselves." Before the year had ended, he would pledge Ford to get a fully self-driving car on the road by 2021.
To have the CEOs of the two largest U.S. automakers saying exactly the same thing within months of each other might sound like groupthink, but it isn’t. The auto industry has been unique not just in declaring a self-disruption and getting out ahead of the curve rhetorically, but in enacting that disruption as enthusiastically as possible, embedding a positive attitude toward new technology in everything it does.
For example, when Fields presided over the reveal of the new GT in early 2015, he stressed how advanced the supercar was—and that it was technology joined to emotion and history. Disruptive technologies made the new GT possible.