Bob Lutz is the laughing stock of the industry, and as such, he earned my vote.

As the one to nominate this statement by Ghosn – though FW has already done some legwork for me.
I like Tennessee. Been there, went hunting and fishing and had a great time.

But the point is that Ghosn decided to relocate his HQ from CA to TN without asking his core management personnel first – and that Nissan suddenly discovered that it was pretty much a question of setting up from scratch as the organization wasn’t as ready to up sticks as the number crunchers thought, and as replacing those who wouldn’t go (with kids in school, spouses with work in other companies, social relationships, and so on) proved difficult to do without disrupting operations.

But it is highly unlikely that that quote will get the award because there are so many better dumb sayings on the list.

I’m sure he’d do a fine job cleaning toilets or perhaps manning the company bowling alley from 1 to 7am.

Hey, I’m just trying to help the dumbass. I’m a giver.

BTW isn’t the name of the ford VP Kuzak not Juzak?

From the original nomination post:

He might have wanted to check into how many of his core management team were willing to relocate. It turns out that the cost of replacing them is much higher than the cost of …

I bet he also believes that the holocaust never happened and that we never landed on the moon.

Good old ignorant people and their conspiracy theories..

For full disclosure, I am a Tennessean and happen to think that thanks to our low taxes overall and specifically our lack of an income tax we’re a great place to do business.

Of course every company is in business to make money, duh!

The arrogant stupidity lies in the fact that, short of printing your own $100 bills, one makes money by providing a product or service that people want.

GM needs to understand that it is in the business of making cars for crying out loud! What’s GM’s (and Detroit’s) problem today? Piss-poor product across the lineups, not to mention mangled brands. (FWIW, the whole ‘burdened by pensions’ thing is a red herring, IMO.)

The moment GM does get into the business of making cars, perhaps it will make money.

Jack Smith was there right in the meat of the period where the foundation for today’s domestic industry’s situation was being laid. With quotes like that.

Did you (actually, he) exceed 800 words?

No. The only limit is about 250 characters per entry on the poll. But if I listed all the comments submitted, there would be 29 entries total. It would have run past the bottom of the screen, even on the high-res over-sized monitor I’m using. For simplicity’s sake I decided to go with one quote per nominee. As you probably guessed most of them were Lutzian in origin, but there were more than one submission for several others.

However, for an executive of a major multinational to imply that a market should change to accept uncompetitive products because of the very things that make them uncompetitive is the height of arrogance and absurdity.