Some Thoughts on Harley Earl
I recently finished William Knoedelseder’s except book FINS – Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit and if the subject matter sounds interesting I strongly recommend it.
That said, this isn’t a book review. Instead I’d like to share a few thoughts still bouncing around in the afterglow of the read.
First, for somebody familiar with the history of Apple it’s impossible to read about Harley Earl and not see similarities between Harley Earl and Steve Jobs. The primary value they each brought to the design process was a very refined sense of taste and judgement. Anybody who knows modern technology winces when an uninformed person says something like “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone.” It would be more accurate to say that he saw what design directions were worth pursuing and could critique a design to within an inch of its life. You might say he played the design team in a way conceptually similar to a conductor leading an orchestra.
Earl seems to have been in a similar state. The book makes it clear that he couldn’t draw and even had a hard time articulating exactly what he wanted. And so the entire design team became his tool as he endlessly critiqued towards his vision. And that vision was his value, for decades he had an uncanny sense of what customers would want in three or four years until, eventually, he didn’t.
The other similarity one can’t help but notice is the way both men managed to extract top quality work from the team and inspiring admiration and loyalty while also often acting like an absolute ass. According to the accounts Knoedelseder relates, Earl had absolute power and would fire men for any disagreement but also for trivialities such as walking in the wrong way. Design departments at competing companies appear to have staffed full of talented people Earl had fired for no good reason. He also excepted himself from restrictions he enforced on his staff, firing one designer for doing unrelated design work on his own time while, at the same time, literally running his own outside design firm. I realize times and social norms change but the details related here really color my previous admiration of the guy.
Second, the end of the story is a compelling description of what happened when Earl’s sense of style diverged from society. Consider the just recently opened GM Technical Center, largely designed by famous modernist architect Eero Saarinen.
Source: http://www.pdparchitects.com/general-motors
Earl was surrounded by clean, modern design and yet his vision was limited to ever more baroque designs with ever more chrome trim. The book relates an incident in which two separate and stylistically independent design options for the 1958 Buick rear quarter panel were placed next to each other for evaluation. Earl walked in, mistook the two options as a single proposal, loved it, and immediately decided to put them both into production. His staff were horrified but were too scared to say anything, knowing they would be fired instantly. The end apparently came when the 1957 Plymouths came out with the latest iteration of Virgil Exner’s super clean “Forward Look” and it became apparent to everybody that GM was going in the wrong styling direction. Bill Mitchell, Earl’s second in command, apparently had a heart to heart talk and Harley eased back into a more managerial role until retirement. It really does make one wonder about an alternate reality in which Steve Jobs didn’t die from cancer at a relatively young age.
It’s hard to have heroes. Most of my life I’ve admired certain people from the perspective of their achievements and then, when I learned more about them as a person, I discover things that make the picture a lot more complicated. Charles Lindbergh is a prime example, but I could name others. The cliche advice about never meeting your heroes has some truth to it. I suppose the answer is to take inspiration from wherever you find it but remember that professional achievement isn’t everything. I really love so many cars from that era as functional sculpture but the way we treat people matters too. So much.
