Leaders provide the direction. In turn, our people's, our shareholder's and the general public's trust depend on our authenticity. This is especially true when your people are passionate for what they do and are looking for direction.
Certainly, there were many questions at Chrysler. While I'm not saying we had all the answers right away, in working with our Executive (Leadership) Committee, we coined a phrase to describe the culture and strategic flare we had to instill at Chrysler. It is called "Disciplined Pizzazz."
"Discipline" applies to issues like cost and quality. From a cost perspective, we set aggressive targets in our "turnaround plan" for Chrysler -a little over a year ago - in the areas of Fixed Costs, Plant Costs and Material Costs. In 2001, we saved $3.3 billion and overachieved on all our targets except on the revenue side. Many of the choices were difficult decisions, for instance, manpower reductions of more than 20,000 in 2001.
From a quality perspective, we're also now acting with the needed discipline. As you know, quality is the price of entry into the marketplace. If football's basics are "blocking and tackling," it's analogous to "tackling." Without it, you simply cannot win.
We view it this way. While those elected in Washington have votes several years apart, we receive our "polls" everyday by the customer and we're always looking for more votes. Last year, in fact, almost forty percent of the country's car buyers voted against the Big Three U.S. Companies primarily on quality perception alone.