Tom Rath

Last year, Bob Lutz retired as vice-chairman of General Motors after a long and celebrated career in the auto industry. Earlier this summer he published a book titled Car Guys vs. Bean Counters. By mid-July it had climbed to No. 16 on the business bestseller list compiled by Nielsen BookScan, the source that book publishers themselves look to.

Car guys or bean counters—care to guess which Lutz identifies with? Yes, he is a car guy. He likes chrome, fine-grained interiors, big rims, and the “wonderful high-pitched wail” of a V-12 engine. He dislikes focus groups, “brand management,” and pointy-headed MBAs. By bean counters, Lutz isn’t just talking accountants: He means anyone who makes decisions based on research and calculation rather than feel and experience. It was the bean counters, he argues, who brought the American auto industry low, churning out uninspiring cars no one wanted to buy. Car guys, with their guts (the title of Lutz’s previous bestseller) and shoot-from-the-hip brio, are the salvation of the American automobile—and of American business itself. “It’s time to stop the dominance of the number crunchers, living in their perfect, predictable, financially projected world (who fail, time and again),” he writes.