Killing the Goose 32

The most exciting thing about starting a new modeling project was the mystery of how it would evolve into something beautiful. I didnt question whether I could make it happen anymore than I questioned whether I would win a firefight in Vietnam.

As a soldier I went into a fight convinced that I was the most fearsome warrior on the planet. After my first successful encounter with the enemy, I realized that I had something inside of me that few people had. I had a sure sense of where the enemy was even when I couldnt see him and a willingness to expose myself to deadly fire so that I could deliver my own deadly fire. I had reliable soldiers on my left and right and a line of support going all the way to aircraft carriers in the South China Sea that could and would send in war birds to take off the top of a 500 hill if necessary. I was part of a fighting machine that used the best talent, training and equipment it could bring to bear wherever and whenever it was required.

Thats what I though I had as a modeler at Ford. Thats what every modeler should have had at Ford.

You never truly know how a battle is going to turn out before it starts. Bad things can happen that you have no control over. That doesnt mean you can afford to think that way. To defeat the enemy you have to see yourself as better than he is. You have to see the job ahead of you as doable and you have to see yourself doing it magnificently.

You are not being arrogant or foolhardy to think this way. If you have the training, the equipment, the organization and the guts for the job you have to do, you have no good reason to believe that you cant do it. A winning mindset is essential for taking charge of the situation and coming out on top.

Turning Walid Sabbas idea for a rotating three-in-one cup holder, ashtray and coin dispenser into a functional item was not a life or death endeavor. Life would go on without a ripple of difference on a sea of change whether it succeeded or failed. However, there was no telling what principles would come out of the attempt. We were certain to learn something of value that could be applied to the next project or the next series of projects, which in turn, could change everything.

The trip that Chuck Jones and I made to Joes Hobby Shop with our Supervisors credit card changed the way many salaried workers at Ford who werent in management got the things they needed in a timely way. The company arranged for us to have our own credit cards for company business. I never used mine because the paperwork Ford required to justify the charges was too stringent. Most of the things that Chuck and I bought with Gregs credit card would not have been approved without a fight. If we lost, we would have had to pay the company back for buying them. Nevertheless, it was an improvement over the old system. With the right person in charge of issuing the cards and monitoring how they were used it had the potential of being everything it should have been.

To define victory you must first define your goal. My goal with Walids gadget was to learn how to do things no one had ever done before to take the art and science of model building to a new level. Walids goal was to make himself look like the superstar designer of the future that Ford hired him to be. I didnt see a conflict. Walid did.

Picture an equilateral triangle with rounded corners and a dimple in the center to rotate around. Thats what the side view of Walids gadget looked like. In a 90-degree view you would see a rectangular face on each side of the triangle as it rotated inside of a consol. On face one, bomb bay doors opened for an ashtray. On side two, a threaded tube screwed out for a cup holder. Side three consisted of slots for pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters with buttons that depressed with springs to allow several coins to fit into each slot.

The coin dispenser was the easiest to make. When I built it, all I had to do was slip the coins into the slots and shake the thing like a paint mixer. When the coins slide easily in and out of the slots and stayed in place when I shook the dispenser with various loads of coins, it was done.

The cup holder was more difficult. Walied wanted the driver or front seat passenger to be able to twist the serrated rim of the holder so that the cylinder raised up to give the holder enough depth for small or medium-sized paper cups. It could hold large paper cups securely the way it was. However, he drew the threads of the cylinder like machine screws, so close together that you would have to twist the rim twenty time to bring it to its maximum height. I designed threads that would do what he said he wanted the cup holder to do to unscrew with the least amount of effort, stay in place while in use and screw back down with the same ease of unscrewing it. The metal shop could not make the threads I drew so I made them myself. It worked.

The beauty of what I discovered when I made the threads by hand was that the threads and the groves they fit into didnt have to be machined. Both parts could be made of cheap plastic in cheap molds that didnt have to adhere to tight tolerances. A little friction at any point along the tread path was good. Thats what made it work.

Walid didnt like it. He insisted that I make the threads the way he drew them and to make it work with a one quarter turn the way I made it work. Jesus, I thought as I looked at him, you must have gotten your engineering degree out of a Cracker Jacks box. Thats when he tipped his hand. He must have realized how stupid he sounded and started backtracking in a way that I thought only or Director Dave Reese could do. Ignoring what he had just said as though he hadnt said it, he told me that he didnt care how many times the rim had to be twisted.

This wasnt Walids first bad act or the first time Mimi shot him down. He started with the coin dispenser buttons. We wanted the Wood Shop to make them but Walids drawing werent accurate enough, so I made the masters and Walid ordered the Plastic Shop to cast them. When they checked with Mimi on the impossibly short time he told them the buttons had to be done for a show and found out that he lied to them, his order went straight to the bottom of the pile. I had to make all of the buttons.

Walid pulled the same stunt with me a few days later, telling me before lunch that I had to have his gadget painted and ready for a show a half hour after lunch. That sort of order is truly impossible to carry out because it takes a fixed amount of time to do some of the things that had to be done like letting the paint dry. You cant order paint to dry faster than it wants to. I had to work through lunch at a frenetic pace and color the part with a Magic Marker. The finish was horrible.

Walid looked at me and shook his head sadly from side to side. Jasper, Jasper, Jasper, he said. I was too stunned to speak. Calvin happened to be there and the anger I saw in his face was so intense that I thought for a moment the old marine was going to floor the young designer. But Calvin was also too stunned to do anything but stand there with his mouth hanging open.

I told Mimi what had happened. This stunt on top of what he did with the Shops worried Mimi. She repeated what I had been told about how great a designer Walid was and I told her what I thought of him. She asked me what I thought she should do. I told her that she should fire him. This was the only time in my life I recommend that someone be fired. Walid wasnt merely a pain in the ass; he was dangerous. If he got into a position of authority, which I was sure he would when he learned the practical politics of design a little better, I could see him creating all kinds of havoc that would cost good workers their jobs.

Mimi told me that she thought he was a young kid who just needed a verbal spanking, so she called him into her office with Dick Petit and me and gave him one. Walid responded by apologizing to me in the humblest terms and explaining to Dick and Mimi that he was so intimidated by my intelligence that he didnt know how to act.

Bullshit! I said. I knew what he was doing. Id seen it before and Id done it myself. Walid was retreating from an untenable situation to put himself in a better position to fight

Now I knew what I was dealing with when Walid kept insisting that I make the ashtray deeper on the third side of the rotating utility box. The deeper it got the more it interfered with the cup holder tube and I keep coming up with ways to accommodate it. He fought the safety engineers on the feasibility of his bomb bay doors. I fixed that, too, with a sliding door that wouldnt allow the box to turn unless the door was complexly shut. Walid fought against it. When I tried to put the gadget inside of a simulated consol I found that it wouldnt rotate the way it should have because the center Walid drew wasnt in the center. He was too smart to have made errors like that by accident. He wanted his own project to fail. He wanted the engineers to fail. He wanted me to fail.

I didnt have all the facts I needed at the time to understand Walids motives. I think I do now. I believe that it was what drove Al Ornis to sabotage the Components group. I think he had inside information on Fords plans to turn all of our work over to Prince. Walid was a protégé of Jack Telnack and Jack Telnack was very high on Prince. As long as we were doing the work more inventively and productively than the vendor could do it, Ford could not follow through on its plan.

The realization of what Ford had in mind for Concepts and Components and why the modelers were screwing it up by performing so well came slowly. I got my first solid clue when Janet Lee designed a clever slide-out compartment for the trunk of the Lincoln Continental and Town Car and Don Painter and Calvin Morrison drew the assignment of making it. Don did one for the Continental. Calvin did one for the Town Car.

While Janet and the engineers were going over a ton of specifications to get the sliding compartments to work, Calvin spied a long piano hinge in our stuff bin and used it to do what they were talking about. In two days, as opposed to nine or ten months, he had a working model. Janet could see what she wanted to see and all the engineers had to do was take some measurements and reverse-engineer what Calvin had done.

Fritz Mayhew saw Cals model and immediately decided to motorize it. Cal Morrison got Janets thanks and the praise of his fellow modelers for his imitative, craftsmanship and inventiveness. Janet and Fritz got joint credit for the idea. Prince got the assignment to make the final version.

Don Painter invented a unique mechanism for a unique sliding seat. It was cheap, simple and efficient and it was never used.

We made a lot of cool things in Concepts that were never used. My favorite was a tote cart designed by an apprentice product designer name Russell Ribbon who knew Janet Lee at Carnage-Melon. Russ was smart, funny and refreshingly honest. You had to like him and you had to admire his style. That is, you had to admire his total lack of style. Russ was Russ. His clothes didnt fit quite right. His hair always looked as though it could use another pass with a comb. He knew that he was brilliant but he didnt seem to think any more about it than he did his wardrobe. He had no pretensions whatever. What you saw was what you got. What he said was what he thought.

Russ couldnt draw much better than Janet could but he was way ahead of where she was when she started and he made a more determined effort than she did to improve. He had to. He was an intern with no guarantee of being hired. And he was Jewish.

Ford already had its quota of two Jewish designers. One of them was Dick Petit, the Manager of Interiors before it became Concepts. Petit was still a Manager in Concepts but Mimi brought in a friend of named Nellie Toledo to be another Manager. Russ Ribbon worked for Nellie Toledo.

I could say that Russ and Nellie were like oil and water but it would be more accurate to say that they were like magnesium and water. Some people just dont like each other. It was that way with Russ and Nellie. I dont know what Nellies problem was with Russ but she rode him like a hard-nosed drill instructor rides a raw recruit standing in formation with his shirttails hanging out. Nothing he did seemed to please her and he needed her approval to get hired.

Russ was up against a deadline for making an impression on the board of executives that would decide his fate. He knew that he couldnt compete against the Art Center graduates with a board full of drawings and he was becoming increasingly frustrated with Nellies insistence that he do more of them. He figured that his best bet was to create a model so dazzling that he wouldnt have to rely on his drawings to compete. He had a great idea for a collapsible baggage cart that would look good, fit easily into the trunk of a Town Car and unfold with a pull of a stylishly designed handle. He couldnt imagine how to make it work.

I was flattered when Russ approached Calvin and me instead of an engineer to ask our advice on various proposals for the cart. It meant that the way we were doing things was so obviously the way to go that a bright young designer was willing to put his career in our hands. It meant that he thought of us as Master Modelers even though we didnt have the title. It also meant that he was observant enough to see that his best chance of success lay with us.

Again, Russ encountered a tough obstacle in Nellie Toledo. His sketches came down to two proposals. One of them looked like an accordion fence with a platform and wheels. That was the one Nellie wanted him to make. It looked functional but Cal and I could see that it wasnt. The other proposal was completely different from anything I had seen. The way at looked and the way Russ wanted it to work was so cool that it stood on its own as a functional piece of property that was certain to turn heads and start conversations with the Lincoln logo on it.

Russ asked me if I could make it. I looked over his drawings which were technically much better than Walids until I could see the mechanism in my head that would make it work. I told Russ that I could do it and I started in on it.

I dont remember what I was doing before, but whatever it was, it could wait. Russ model couldnt. Yes, I was sure I could do it. I wasnt sure that I could do it in time. I had to make my own springs and gears. I had to test the material for appearance, workability and strength. I was bound to run into unforeseen problems that would force miner changes in design and Russ was bund to see some things he wanted to change as the model progressed. Another job could heat up and Dennis or Greg might pull me off of the cart to handle it.

I didnt think that anyone would object to me taking on the project. If it worked it would enhance the status of the studio. If it didnt, I could still make it look good and the studio would look good. Only Russ, Janet, Calvin, Don and I expected that something so complex could be done in a month. Thats all the time we had for Russ presentation. Like Janet Lee, Russ was the kind of designer Ford needed for those added value items that our cars had to have to compete with GM and Toyota.

Nellie Toledo was a design manager at GM before she came to Ford. Her knowledge of what GM was going to offer in the way of value added items might have been why Mimi wanted her in Concepts. I dont think that Mimi took into account the extent to which Nellie could be arbitrary, autocratic and uncompromising. Those qualities were not compatible with an environment in which so many creative and intelligent people worked. They could have hurt us badly. They almost killed us.

Making the cart was a bear. The day before Russ presentation we worked around the clock. The final coat of paint that I sprayed on the outside was enough to keep the internal mechanism from working the way it did before I applied the paint. We were down to the last ten minutes and our fatigue-softened brains were tapped out of options.

The handle was supposed to telescope in one smooth motion. As it came out, one wide, flat support bar was supposed to flip to the right and the one above it that was hidden in the shaft was supposed to flip to the left. The effect was starting, in a good way, because it was impossible to guess from looking at it in the collapsed mode, that the handle could extend as far as it did and the crossbars could unfold the way they did. The linear element of the design and Russs paint combinations created the illusion that the top bar was as wide as the telescoping boxed column it came out of. But with the paint, which hadnt had time to dry, the column did not telescope smoothly. It got stuck.

Emory Seveges and Don Painter came to our rescue. Emory sprayed the upper crossbar with silicon and Don Painter use a long aluminum mouse with a chiseled edge to crape down the inside. Now the mechanism worked smoothly too smoothly. I didnt have time to put in a stop for the telescoping handle, which wasnt a problem for the demonstration because Russ was used to the feel of it and knew when to stop pulling.

Afterwards, Nellie Toledo supported the project with enthusiasm and I got the impression that her attitude toward Russ took an upswing, although Im not sure Russ saw the change. It didnt help, though. Ford did not hire Russ Ribbon. Before he left he gave me a Cross pen, which I sill have. Engraved on it were the words, The Thinker.

Who knows what Ford was thinking when it let Russ go. It couldnt have had anything to do with his talent, which he had proven the way Janet had proven hers. Without Russ, Janet was the only true product designer we had. The only thing left behind was his cart. Everyone who had seen it was still buzzing about it. Can you imagine design professionals getting excited and staying exited about a tote cart?

A new modeler named Dean Zimmerman, who had previously worked in job shops for six years thought the Russ Ribbon tote cart was so cool that he came up with an idea for a Town Car ad that featured the cart:

An elegantly dressed woman lifts the lid of her Town Car trunk and pulls out the cart. She pulls the handle, the carrying platfrom drops down and the crossbars flip out. Passersby gaze admiringly at the cart. One of them tells her how great it looks and asks where she got it. She tells them that she got it at her Lincoln-Mercury dealer.

I reworked the cart, giving the inside more clearance and putting on better wheels. I hoped that if I made it well enough our engineers could take it apart to see how it worked, our draftsmen could draw it up to precise dimensions and Ford would reconsider hiring Russ Ribbon. I used a cotter pen for a stop that doubled as a way of holding all the parts together so that I could assemble and disassemble them easily to refine and test the internal mechanism.

When I got back, the only thing on the table was the cotter pin. Naturally, I was upset. The cart was one of a kind. If someone who didnt know how it worked assembled it, which anyone could have done, and pulled the handle all the way out, handmade parts could go flying everywhere. My biggest fear was that a designer would do just that, showing of the cart to a buddy.

Not just any designer pulled that stunt. It was Nellie Toledo. She was showing it off to a high-level executive. The handle came out. She was embarrassed and she angrily blamed the mishap on me. I fired back that it was her fault. I showed her the cotter pen, where it fit and told her why she shouldnt have taken the cart without asking me. She retorted that the properties I worked on were her responsibility and she didnt have to ask my permission to do anything she wanted to with them.

Every one of the modelers were as upset as I was for the same reasons. All of us were worried about designers in general helping themselves to anything we were working when we werent around to explain to them why it might not be a good idea. At various points in the process of building a model something that looked like it could be handled without causing damage could be done safely only the person working on it. It wasnt an issue of authority with us. It was an issue of wasted time, unnecessary work and possible damage to our professional reputations. The thing that Nellie did with the cart reflected badly and unfairly on the entire studio, our quality of work and our reason for existing.

Mimi handled the situation with patience and diplomacy that eased the tension and resolved nothing. Yes, designers should ask if they could take things from the modelers worktables. But they didnt have to.

I can make only an uninformed guess as to what the ramifications were for Nellies demonstration with the cart. Im not sure who she showed it to and I have no idea what that person took away from it.

I do know that Nellie had no concept of what the cart represented in terms of the process that created it in four weeks instead a year. No one in the business had ever done anything like that. From what I learned, I figured that I could make another cart in two weeks. Nellie wanted me to make another one in a week. She got angry and stomped away when I told her I didnt think I could do it. I believe that she thought I was simply being defiant.

On my next project I was defiant. Dennis Phinney gave me a Walid Sabba drawing for a fold down tray mounted on a seat back. A string attached to each corner was supposed to hold the tray in a cantilevered position. A slide out tray contained a shallow depression for a cup holder. This was ridiculous. The strings were Mickey Mouse and the cup holder was functional only if the car was sitting still on level ground.

I told Dennis that I wanted no part of it. He told me that I had no choice; although he agreed with me that the stings and the cup holder depression were amateurish things that he would not want to be associated with, either. Therefore, he let me see what I could do to come up with an invisible device to replace the strings and a cup holder that would work under driving conditions on the back of a seat that could tilt backward or forward by forty degrees.

I struggled with a locking fold down mechanism that I couldnt get to work as well as it needed to work. Dennis Phinney designed and made one that worked perfectly.

My best idea for the cup holder was to turn Walids shallow depression into a hole but that wasnt good enough for an adjustable seatback. Cal Morrison looked the problem over and said that the cup holder needed to be put into a gimbal. I didnt know what a gimbal was. Calvin explained that it was a device used on ships to keep cooking pots and things like that level no matter how much the ship rolled with the waves. He was right. That was exactly what we needed.

No gimbal on the market suited our needs so I made one that did. Nobody else in the studio could figure out how to do it. The engineers said that it was impossible. When they explained way it couldnt be done it didnt occur to them that they were only defining the obstacles that had to be overcome and in the processes telling me how to overcome them. They only believed it was impossible because their brains were locked on conventional solutions. I found unconventional solutions.

I was the only one in the studio who could have made the gimbal for the sliding seatback tray because I was the only one in the studio with the particular mix of technical knowledge and skills it required. Dennis overbuilt everything. He would have made it with much bigger gaps and thicker bushings than necessary. He would have used, stronger and harder to modify materials. He would have seen a need to do too many things that didnt need to be done. Calvins near vision wasnt good enough and his hands were too big to manipulate some of the tiny parts. He wouldnt have even thought of some of the things that had to be done.

Various disqualifying limitations applied to Chuck Jones, Benny DeNaro, Don Painter, Mike Wyman and right on down the line to all of the other modelers assigned to Concepts and Components. However, as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel while I was building the gimbal, three other modelers in the Design Center popped into my mind who also could have made it. I thought of Vern Ball, George Chertier and Jim Hobiar. The things that Calvin, Dennis and the others could do that I couldnt do or couldnt do as well as they could were a given. The weakest link metaphor did not apply in the studio or the Design Center. None of us had a lot of weaknesses and wherever one of us was weak someone else was strong.

The strongest link principle was the foundation for the system I developed in Components. To make it work, you had to be unflinchingly honest about your abilities. False modesty was as much a liability as false pride. Inflexibility was as harmful as undisciplined creativity. The old way wasnt always the best way and the new way wasnt always better than the old way. There was a place for conventional designing, clay modeling and engineering and a place for simultaneous designing, modeling and engineering. Matching the tools, techniques, materials and people to the job and leaving the people alone to see the job through brought these assents together in a self-improving, self-perpetuating recipe for success.

Unfortunately, the only other people in the studio who understood the fundamentals of designing, modeling and engineering simultaneously were Cal Morrison and Don Painter. Jack LaBlanc wasnt there anymore. Dennis Phinney went along with it because he recognized the dramatic reduction in lead-time[1] it produced but he never fully grasped the underlying principles. He measured progress by the hour and he built things that he couldnt change if they didnt work the way he anticipated. A key aspect of the process was an understanding that most new things you designed were not going to work the way you expected. You had to make them so that you could change them as the need revealed itself.

The gimbal looked terrific and worked splendidly until it had to slide back into the tray. The gimbals thin, flat rings within rings that had to swing freely needed to be collapsed by hand onto the flat plain of the sliding try to go into the seatback slot. We need something simple to make it collapse into the plain automatically as the backseat passenger pushed the gimbaled tray into the slot.

Several modelers and an engineer joined Dennis, Calvin and me in a brainstorming session to find the best solution. We played with different ideas as we played with the part. We got a lot of answers, most of them bad, some of the mediocre and one of them superlative.

Kevin Schaeffer, one of seven contract modelers from an independent Ford feeder company in Dearborn, gave us the solution. The rest of us were slow to accept it but Kevin persisted until he had won us over. I was the last. I was thinking along different lines and I had to pull my mind out of the deep groove of thought it was in to see what he was talking about. When I saw it, I also saw more clearly why the engineers had so much trouble keeping up with the modelers innovations and why they were never able to get ahead of them.

It was the old functional fix phenomenon. Everybody gets trapped at least 80 percent of the time into using familiar applications for familiar elements in a problem when the solution calls for them to be used in a different way.

The classic Psychology 101 example of functional fixedness is the problem of using a plank of wood, a hammer, a nail, a screwdriver a screw and a set of pliers to construct a four-legged table. If you start by using the hammer to pound the nail, and the screwdriver to drive the screw it probably wont occur to you how to use the pliers. But if you start with the pliers and open them up to use the handles as two of the table legs you can make the table. The less experience you have working with these tools the more likely you are to solve the problem.

I couldnt see Kevins answer to collapsing the gimbaled rings when you pushed it into the seatback because of the success I had with rotating the crossbars of the cart and sliding them into the shaft with a single push. It looked like a similar problem but it wasnt.

I was embarrassed that it took Kevin and then Kevin and Calvin together so much effort to convince me that Kevin was right. I feared that my ego might have stood in the way of my vision. When I realized what had really happened I was elated. A good idea could come from anywhere at any time. The engineer and the experienced modeler probably would have broken through their functional fixes eventually. Meanwhile a rookie modeler had given us what we needed like Athena springing full grown from the brow of Zeus in full-body armor, clutching a spear and ready to do battle. I knew then that there were no limits to what Concepts could do if we opened the process for early input from a wider array of people.

Dennis Phinney went on a two-week vacation and turned over his duties to me. We were preparing a big show for Fritz Mayhew, Jack Telnack and Red Poling, who had recently ascended to the presidency of Ford Motor Co. We had so much to do, so little time to do it and so few experienced modelers to help us that Dennis suggested I write off some of the projects and concentrate on a few that looked doable. I thought that all of them were doable.

In the early fall of 1990 Ford brought in a Master Modeler from England to learn our techniques. He was so blown away by what we were doing that he suffered a crippling crisis of confidence. That problem could be fixed. Evelyn Bowman, a contract worker like Kevin Schaeffer was so smart and so talented that I knew she could do much more than she was doing. Eric Fregard, the older son of my friend Ray Fregard was another contract modeler I knew was capable of doing more than he was doing. A pale, skinny contract worker who looked like a vampire, dressed like a hippie and spoke only when he had something nasty to say, was one of the best craftsmen Ive every seen. He, too, could be valuable.

Everywhere I looked I saw personnel assets that werent being used to their full potential. I didnt have to do everything that Dennis felt he had to do or rely exclusively on people like Calvin to do all of the inventing that I didnt do. I knew that I could also count on Kevin Schaeffer and Evelyn Bowman if necessary. Whats more, I had an edge that Dennis didnt have. I had a system for inventing that any competent modeler could apply.

All of the modelers at my disposal were competent. I laid out the system and they had to come to me only when they got stuck. I was able to unstick them quickly because I didnt have the functional fixes that they had a lesson I learned from Kevin Schaeffer.

The show would have been a whopping success if it hadnt been canceled at the last minute. Calvin saw the implications of what happened and paid me the biggest complement of my professional career. He said, If Ford was serious about all this stuff were doing, they would make this a permanent department and put you in charge of it.

I couldnt revel in the complement because of the condition Calvin attached to it: If Ford was serious It was no longer a secret that Ford had decided to turn over our operations to Prince.

[1] The time it takes to go from the concept of a product to its final assembly. The shorter the lead-time the greater the ratio of profits to expenditures.