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Chapter 38

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Chapter 37: For the Record 

In the early stages of the PR/PP group discussions, George Valsa made the vital error of aggressively challenging my logic and my motives. He ended up looking ridiculous because his own data consistently proved that logic was on my side and my motives were irrelevant because my proposals addressed only the issues all of us where there to address. It didn’t matter whether you got shafted because of your color, your sex or your hairdo or because someone with a lot of power saw you as a “slow talking, slow walking, pipe-smoking son-of-a-bitch.” You don’t have to make racial prejudice an issue if you can devise a system of recognition and rewards that takes all forms of prejudice into account.  

I was trying to get the group to recommend a salary adjustment mechanism like the one Jim Biando mistakenly believed was already in place. It would require a fund outside of the merit fund that Supervisors could use only once in an employee’s career. I proposed that it could be done only in extreme cases where merit increases could not make up the difference between where they were and where they should be in the Supervisor’s judgment. The Supervisor had to make a compelling case with documents and witnesses to support it and the employee would get no compensation for lost income before the adjustment was made. Gary Haas, Al Biggs and Lydia agreed with Valsa that it was a bad idea.  

After the meeting I stopped Valsa and asked him what he really thought about my salary adjustment plan, He glared at me and said something in a raised, angry voice about how irrational and dishonest I was. His diatribe made so little sense I couldn’t remember it right after he said it. I couldn’t even put it together. His pupils were like pinpoints but he didn’t look flushed. I thought it was an act. I’d seen it before in a different committee and a slightly different form with a Ford executive named Torkelson who literally leaned on me when he couldn’t beat me down with his arguments. I leaned back. This time I didn’t answer in kind. I let Valsa beat himself down with his arguments.  

When the “outraged exec” routine didn’t fly, Valsa quietly reiterated what he said in the meeting. He said that the merit system would correct any shortfalls in fair remuneration. I reiterated what I said in the meeting. I said that it couldn’t be done without hurting someone else.   

When I saw I was getting nowhere, I said, “Then the only recourse a person in that position has is to sue the company.” 

Valsa replied, “You got promoted. If you sue, Ford will vigorously argue that you were in the range.”

Valsa walked away toward his office with the last word. Charles Purnell and I drove to Marin Wiseman’s office to begin our lawsuit.  

My participation in the Performance Review/Promotional Practices Task Force gave me an inside view of why so many aspects of Ford management were dysfunctional. I got some of it from Personnel data George Valsa shared with the group and the long convoluted process he went through with Lydia to “prove” that Ford’s current merit award system was the best thing going.  I got most of it from the old Gary Haas designer I used to know with a good head on his shoulders and the new Gary Haas Director with his ass on his shoulders and his head up his ass.

Gary was on to our better Directors. 

I first saw the kind of transformation Gary went though when I was a high school ROTC cadet. I saw it again in the Army. Private Jekyll was a great guy and a valuable member of the team. When he got promoted to corporal he became Corporal Hyde, a jerk and a fuck-up artist who thought he was doing great things. Sometimes Jekyll didn’t turn into Hyde until he made sergeant, lieutenant or captain. Like alcohol, everybody has a limit of power they cannot exceed without crippling impairment to their judgment. When they go beyond that point you’d better give their car keys to somebody else.  

Mimi Vandermolen and Daryl Beemer didn’t reach that point of impairment when they became Directors. Jack Telnack didn’t get there until he made vice president.  

I’m not talking about a character flaw that some people have and some people don’t. I’m taking about a weakness in everyone’s character that comes out if we are wrongly informed by people we trust that we are vastly superior in intellect and wisdom to people “below us” in status and power. The people most likely to rise to the highest levels at Ford worked the hardest and had the most success in following the Ford way of doing things – no matter how cumbersome or shortsighted it was. If Ford was on a bender of making ill conceived policy and process decisions, the people at the top of the list for promotions were the ones who were farthest ahead in mastering them.  

George Valsa taught me that Ford was so big and so entangled in webs of intrigue and deception that nobody at the top knew what was going on below. The higher people rose in management the more management involved them in complex, meaningless abstractions. They were kept busy with mountains of administrative chores that pushed them farther and farther away from the people and practices that moved the company ahead or pushed it backward. There were so many hidden agendas at every level that the only way to appear to be on top of things was to excel in the art of pretending to understand what you didn’t.  

Everything of substance that happened in the PR/PP meetings went right over Gary’s head. He frequently consulted well-organized company memos and notes he had taken at senior management meetings. His questions and comments had to have come from those memos and notes. Like TV Guide summaries of Casablanca or Othello they frequently bore only a sketchy resemblance to the subjects under discussion.  

Little seemed to go over George Valsa’s head. His grasp of the issues and their implications did him little good. He was so busy giving them a status quo spin that he had to give us inside information to keep from sounding like a moron. The “rebels” in the group were chipping away at his figures for calculating raises that were supposed to correspond to O’s, EP’s and E’s when he baked himself into one such corner…  

The amount of funds the company set aside for merit increases wasn’t enough to give everyone the minimum of what he or she was entitled to according to the official table. Merits were allocated to departments. Depending on the number of people in each department, their average salary and the distribution of O’s EP’s and E’s among them, the dollar amount going into each department’s merit pot varied greatly. Depending on the company’s profits for any year the department average had to be 5% or lower. To give one person 6, somebody else had to get 4 or everyone’s raises had to be juggled to produce the same result. 

The only way Valsa could make the math work was to tell us that Personnel took funds from one department with more money than it needed to put into another department that needed more. If that didn’t do the trick, Personnel could take money from a surplus in the promotion fund, which was separate from the merit fund. When we factored in department sizes that varied from two people to 40 and the management raises that went into a separate, untouchable pot, the money shuffling got more complicated. The bottom line was the same. There wasn’t enough money in any available fund to raise the average for GSR pay increases above five percent. In some years the average dropped to 4 percent.  

Personnel could keep track of how much money was available to go where only with annual Ford profit statements, annual department PR rating distributions and annual rates of progression for each GSR employee. To maintain the fiction that the official merit increases were legitimate, Ford had to use two sets of accounting books; one set for Personnel and the IRS and another set for public relations and the EEOC. Ford was literally stealing money from some of its GSR employees and giving it to its top executives but it was doing it within the law. 

Armed with this information I could stop speculating about my actual pay increases at Ford since 1977. They never exceed 6%. My average was less than the GSR average for my pay grade. That’s why I got so many E’s and EP’s instead of O’s and why Purnell Leak nor I could get over the midpoint hump that separated superior modelers from inferior ones in the same pay grade for the same length of time. I could see from other statistics Valsa showed the group that it had nothing to do with our performance relative to anyone else’s performance. It had everything to do with number of O’s ahead of us in continuous year of seniority.  

The Design Center had too many O’s dating back to the 1960s. It was like a professional baseball team with too many outstanding players and a salary cap for an average team. Ford saw the O’s and EP’s as evidence of inflated value without taking into account the unusually high level of talent required of us to do our jobs. An outside consultant from a prestigious university called it the “Lake Woebegone Syndrome” The reference was to a line in humorist Garrison Keilor’s description of his hometown were: “…all the children are above average.”       

For most salaried positions in the Design Center all of the “children” had to be above average to get on the payroll. Ideally, all of us should have eventually reached the O level with an ongoing program of “coaching and counseling” to maximize everyone’s potential. That couldn’t happen under the PR system we were using because it required the Supervisors to force rank everyone in the same pay grade on a static curve. [1]   

In my first Master Modeler meeting, Joe Seibold tried to explain to us the curve that Ford was using. He immediately demonstrated that he didn’t understand how it worked or why it couldn’t work with a relatively small number of highly skilled people. University professors who grade their students on a “curve” don’t understand it, either. If they did understand the curve they wouldn’t use it unless they were looking for a pseudo-scientific way to justify giving most of their students lower grades than they deserved.  

It’s called a “bell curve” because it looks like a bell on a graft. The bell curve originated with 18^th century mathematicians trying to predict the probability of a given outcome in games of chance. In a poker game, for instance, few players will have cards dealt to them that are so bad they have no reasonable chance of winning and few people will get cards so good that they have no reasonable chance of loosing. If the players draw cards at random to see who will deal the cards, their chances of drawing a duce are the same as their chances of drawing an ace. In all likelihood they will draw a card somewhere between the highest and the lowest in the deck. The odds for each player are the same.  

The bell curve works only with large numbers and random samplings. It came to be used in ways other than calculating gambling odds when its value in other applications became evident. You can see its proper use wherever large crowds gather in North America. If you measure the height of every adult male in the crowd and lined them up from tallest to shortest, you will get a height distribution comparable to most other large North American crowds. But if you tried to get that distribution with a large group of African Watusis or Pigmies you’d be on a fool’s errand.  

The shortest Watusi man is taller than most “tall” North American men. Measuring their height difference on a bell curve is like measuring the intellectual difference between Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, George Washington Carver, Werner Heisenberg and Thomas Edison.  

If you put these guys on Ford’s curve, only one of them would be a genius. One would be a near genus. One would be average. One would be intellectually deficient and one would be a dunce. Some people would pick Heisenberg for the dunce because they don’t know who he was. Some would pick Carver because they don’t have a true picture of what he did. Some would pick Newton because Einstein found flaws in his laws of physics. Some would pick Edison because he talked funny, his math teacher did the math for his first relativity theory and his hair was a mess. If they worked for the Nazi and the Klansman I worked for when I first came to Ford, Einstein and Carver would have gone to the bottom just because Einstein was Jewish and Carver was black. 

You can’t use women in an example like this because not enough people would recognize enough of the names to have the same impact. That’s not the fault of women as a group. The fault lies with institutions that withheld the opportunities and recognition men have gotten in similar fields of endeavor. You can never know the identity of great people who never got the recognition for what they did or never got the opportunity to do it.  

In the Master Modeler meeting, Joe asked us to force rank all the Sculptors in the studio on a one to five scale to be considered for Masters on the next promotion list. Joe told us that the meeting was confidential so no one could say who voted for whom. I thought that I would be able to keep that confidence in good conscience but I soon saw that I couldn’t keep all of it confidential. We weren’t priests who had to keep silent when a parishioner confessed that he poisoned the sacramental wine. We had an obligation to the “Church” and to the parishioners. If you don’t follow me now, you will.  

Only Dennis Phinney and I picked Cal Morrison and George Green as our top two candidates. One Master picked Cal third. The others picked George in their top three but none of them picked Cal, Purnell or Leak higher than fourth. They weren’t even on most of their lists. One Master made his number one choice because “He has 40 years of seniority and he does everything I tell him.” Another Master’s top pick, as a graduate of Ford’s clay modeling class of ’86, had been working in the profession for only six years. Somehow he missed a few basics and I never saw him do anything that I would have been proud to do. His sponsor called him “…the best modeler I ever saw.”  

I thought, so this is what goes on in these meetings. God Lord! 

Not one of the Masters other than I saw anything wrong with grading Sculptors they had never worked with. They gave all of those modelers below average scores. I couldn’t even decide between Cal and George as my top pick and I starting sweating when I found myself trying to justify lowering my high ratings for Purnell and Leak. I’d worked with both of them enough to know that they were as good as I graded them the first time but I knew how it would look if said so. It would look like I gave them higher marks than they deserved because they were black.  

It didn’t look any better for me when I refused to give any Sculptor a lower score than I gave Purnell and Leak and then abstained from rating anyone I hadn’t worked with enough to know what they could do. Some of them had worked with me briefly and done a poor job. That didn’t make them poor modelers. The best modelers had bad moments or bad days. I finally scribbled out my whole list and told Joe why I couldn’t continue. I presented the best case I could for why none of us should do it. By going along with the forced ranking program we were devaluing the entire profession. I did not get a groundswell of support.  

That wasn’t the end of it.  

Supervisors had the best overview of who was doing what. They made the final recommendations for promotion that they would submit to their fellow Supervisors for a vote. The reason they went through the forced ranking procedure with their Masters that Joe Seibold asked me to take part was because they couldn’t always see everything they needed to see to make a sound judgment. It was normal procedure and they sometimes got a surprise as Joe Seibold did with George Green who had never stood out in his mind as being particularly talented or capable of leadership. 

A new Master told Purnell about his first Master Modeler meeting before I joined the club when Joe told his Masters that one of the black Sculptors was going to be promoted. He told them to force rank us. Calvin came in first. Purnell was second, then Leak. I pulled up the rear. 

That referendum could have been a factor in Personnel making me a Master Modeler ahead of Calvin. Ford couldn’t argue that it promoted eight Masters at the same time if a white modeler on that list was already a Master who had a voice in deciding who the first black Master was going to be. That meeting was supposed to be confidential, too. But the first person to spill the beans wasn’t necessarily the new Master who spilled them to Purnell. Joe Seibold had to have told Personnel about it and Personnel had to have told him he would not be involved in the unprecedented decision making process. Personnel didn’t have to tell him why. That was confidential.  

Ford had a warehouse of sins hidden under the word “confidential.” Personnel administrators didn’t know what went on in confidential Master Modeler meetings or Supervisor meetings. They didn’t know who said what. They didn’t know how much influence some Masters had or, as it was with the bigots who worked for my first Supervisor, the Masters who made the Supervisors’ decisions about particular modelers like me. They didn’t know when Supervisors like Gerry Folgman bypassed the input of their Masters who thought highly of modelers like me to make negative judgments unilaterally. All they knew were the names of the participants and the outcomes. They didn’t want to know anything else.  

Knowledge is accountability. 

I had enough experience with Ford’s confidential meetings to know that they had less to do with unfettered dialogue than with giving Personnel administrators plausible deniability and allowing them to edit the facts. The most productive meetings I was ever involved in at Ford, like the ones with the executive vice presidents were open to scrutiny. If the objective of the PR/PP task force was to make performance reviews and promotional practices fair and honest as well had to have them perceived as such, opening them up to inspection was the only way to do it.   

Nobody had to sue the company to get what they thought they were entitled to if everyone could see whether they had a legitimate claim. Selling that idea to the committee, chaired by Al Biggs, was a struggle all the way because most members interpreted everything I said as a racial commentary. It took a full year to turn them around.  

The turning point came soon after George Valsa announced that our group was going to be the pilot for the company. I had been arguing that the O, EP, E, SP, S, SM and U rating scheme for the general salary role and the Exceeds Expectations, Fully Meets Expectations and Partially Meets for management were bullshit. I said that there was no functional difference between them and the only ratings that meant anything were the top three.  

George Valsa said that Ford facilities outside of the Design Center used all seven performance ratings, which was insane because each rating was subdivided into three levels and you couldn’t get a raise if you fell to the bottom level of the third rating. I argued that the PR form was a report card and any name you gave the top three ratings stood for A’s B’s and C’s. Garry Hass said that I was wrong. Nobody said that I was right. They were hung up on the words that defined the ratings and they were looking for ways to improve the wording. 

Some good came out of that effort led by Bob Scott and Bob Akin with Haas, Valsa, Biggs and Lydia resisting all the way. I didn’t see what the Bobs were getting at until one of them declared that the Supervisors were going to have to stop trying to make everybody feel good and tell their poor performers what they honestly thought. The PR survey group I was in over a decade earlier ran into a wall with the same proposal. We were not permitted to change the rating nomenclatures and there was no way to define “Excellent” as mediocre. This time we had someone on the team who could make a difference.  

George Valsa finally saw the light and came over to the side of the Bobs. Lydia followed him. Haas still wasn’t convinced that the Bobs were right but reluctantly went along with the rest of the group.  

Valsa’s conversion surprised me. Until I saw the light bulb go off in his head, I thought that he was only pretending not to understand what was wrong with the performance review system. Now I could see that he honestly didn’t get it because his focus was on defending it, not understanding it. He, too, had questions about why the GSR and management performance reviews were worded the way they were. It just hadn’t occurred to him to ask those questions. With his new mandate, he could get the man who designed the performance review forms for the general salary roll to join one of our meetings. Until then not even George Valsa knew who he was. 

Our guest was John Turner, no relation to my nemesis Dave Turner. I hadn’t seen his name on any organization chart and I didn’t recognize his title. I did recognize his expensive suit and Valsa’s corporate equivalent of genuflecting in his presence. He was unpretentious, direct and relaxed. He carried no briefcase, cue cards or props, signaling to us that anything he had to tell us was in his brain. He reminded me of Red Poling.

He briefed us on the history of the current Ford performance review, giving all of us one shock after another with his candor as well as the content of his revelations. He did not attempt to defend what he did or to apologize. He just told us what he knew about it. He knew everything. 

John Turner wrote the performance review for the general salary roll and management. Without a word from me, he told the group that they were the same. They only looked different because Ford’s management personnel wanted them to look different. He said that the only rankings that meant anything were the top three. He called them A, B and C.  

If you have a picture in your mind of all eyes in the room turning toward me, forget it. Jerome Quenneville looked at me with a grin. Lydia looked at me with her mouth open and the color drained from her face as though she had suddenly lost eight pints of blood. I cannot tell you why no one else looked at me except to speculate that they didn’t want to embarrass Haas and Valsa who were sitting on my side of the table with me sitting between Haas and Turner.  

Then came the stunner of stunners. This is going to sound familiar… 

Turner told us that he had been involved in an exercise similar to ours with Ford management groups. They wrestled with the same issues we had and couldn’t reach a consensus. Turner concluded that the problem was in the premise of the PR system, which assumed a normal performance curve. Ford wanted its supervisors to practice coaching and counseling to bring up performance to the highest levels.  The curve was inconsistent with couching and counseling.  

Turner painted a picture of how things were done at the top levels of the company that I hadn’t clearly seen before. Comities in one form or another decided every major issue. Even the CEO couldn’t have everything his way.  He was a creature of the board that appointed him, a board made up of finance people, product people, process people, etc. They lined up support for what they wanted to do, traded favors and made compromises just like any other body of politicians. Some of them, like John Turner, saw major elements of the big picture the way I did but didn’t have the influence to realize their vision.  

In the final analysis it was up to the supervisors to do the best they could with what they had and Turner told us that the company was working hard on training them better than they had in the past. It seemed to me that the people appointed the supervisors also had some things to learn. Assuming all of them wanted to be fair and honest I didn’t see how they could do it if they didn’t know how to recognize prejudice in themselves or genius in their workers. Few people did.

I asked our guest if those two items were in the curriculum.  

Without hesitation or elaboration, he said, “No.” 

After the meeting Valsa, Haas, Biggs and Lydia could no longer insist that my reform arguments were fallacious and my concrete proposals were unworkable. They could no longer proceed as though the biggest problem with the performance reviews and promotional practices were with the way some people perceived them. All of a sudden everybody in the group was on my side and it looked for a while as though I could sell my salary adjustment to upper management. I thought that Purnell and I would be able to call off the lawsuit and let our work, rather than an artificial curve and pressure on our Supervisors to keep us below the midpoint, dictate how high we would go.  

The closer I came to tightening the nuts and bolts of the plan the more resistance I got until I was stopped cold. A fair system of remuneration had no place in Ford’s new strategy for increasing profitability. Ford’s top planners were looking at pie charts with big slices of the cost-pie they couldn’t control directly and tying to figure out ways to narrow the slices they could control. Their number one target was labor. They were reducing labor costs in almost every area of operations. The exception was upper management, where they argued they had to pay top dollar to attract and retain the best talent and the pie slice was too thin to count.  

It was a good argument that should have been applied to product researchers and developers from top to bottom. Ford applied it only at the top with a considerable investment of time and money in creating the illusion that it was applying it fairly and honestly from top to bottom. The illusion cost did not show up in a slice of the pie because it was included in the salaries and bonuses Ford paid to its personnel administrators and lawyers. To defend itself in lawsuits like mine, the company paid an outside law firm $1,000 an hour.    

Contractual obligations with the UAW prevented Ford from slashing the wages and benefits of its hourly employees so it was building new plants in Mexico[2] and using more contract workers in the States. Most of Ford’s salaried workers were not unionized. The company could, therefore, take what it wanted from us as long as it did so in carefully measured stages and held out the carrot of bigger raises and faster promotions to its “top performers.” The performance review system in place was the best tool available for simplifying the process at the top rungs of the decision making ladder. 

Social scientists use more than one curve to measure differences in populations. In the Watusi/Pygmy case they would use a j-curve, which measures differences in rare populations that are not randomly selected. You could fit Ford’s clay modelers on a j-curve. You would not be able to compare it to salaried workers in general because the skills required of an automotive sculptor are rare and can only be compared to other automotive sculptors. They start high because the occupation demands it and they go higher. For a group like Einstein, Newton, Carver, Heisenberg and Edison you would need a tool called a rare-zero differential. You can’t make a curve out of it because the people in this group are so rare in any population that their differences don’t matter.    

I learned about bell curves, j-curves and rare-zero when I was following my interests in one of my high school X-classes. I understood them but most people don’t. It looks like deadly boring stuff on the surface. And terms like “frequency distribution” used to describe what they are in general and what they do specifically intimidate most people into thinking the can’t understand them. That’s how Ford was able to get away with using the bell curve to force rank its salaried workers.  

I found myself beating my head against a wall trying to explain it to the PR/PP committee. The article and charts I brought in didn’t help, so I made a working model that everyone could understand.  

I used the spherical heads of map pins in three colors to correspond to two O’s, two E’s and six EP’s. I use a plastic prescription medicine bottle and made a space on the top to hold the little colored balls. I made a funnel in the top space of the vial and ran a transparent straw through the hole in the funnel to the bottom of the vial. I taped over the top compartment so the balls were hidden. That way you couldn’t tell which balls were going to come out of the top chamber when you shook the vial and turned it over to let the ball roll into the tube. The result was a random order of colored balls going into the tube.  

I tested my model and got other people to test it until there was no question that it fed the balls through the tube in a random order. Then I made another model with a bigger hopper for a hundred balls and longer transparent tube for them to funnel into. I used a black magic marker to ring the tube into ten equal sections representing ten Ford departments and allow ten colored balls to fill each section when the device was shaken and tuned over.  

Now everyone could see the frequency distribution with out those troublesome words to confuse them. They could see how often two O’s, two E’s and six EP’s were likely to fall into each department. No matter how many times you shook the gadget up and turned it over, you were as likely to get five O’s and five EP’s in the same “department” as you were to get a distribution of two O’s, two E’s and six EP’s. If you expanded one department to twenty people represented by the balls you got a little closer to an equivalent of the two-two-six spread. If you expanded two departments to twenty people and one to forty your chances of getting the target spread was always better in the largest group but the odds of getting lopsided results in the smaller groups increased.  

Here was demonstrable proof that you couldn’t apportion performance review ratings fairly on the assumption that everyone in each department had a fixed place on a bell curve. I presented it to the committee. To my consternation most committee members still didn’t get it. They thought that it was a fascinating toy. They thought the stream of balls pouring into the tube was a magic trick because they couldn’t see where so many of them could have come from. George Valsa dismissed it as an attempt on my part to use theatrics in place of evidence to support my position. That’s as far as it went. And that was as far as I went with the committee. My work in design and my lawyer’s work would have to do the rest.  

Purnell had to keep doing the work he always did but as Ford’s first black Master Modeler I had to find a conspicuous way to go beyond the call of duty to ward off the attacks I knew were coming. I staked my legal case on the extraordinary claim that I was an extraordinary modeler who was being paid at the rate of an inferior modeler. The fact that I was being paid in the lower half of the Sculptor range before my promotion only made it possible for Ford to argue that I was inflating my worth and the company went beyond the call of duty to promote me.  

I was no longer just a modeler. I was all of the black Master Modelers Ford had. I was all of the black Masters Ford ever had and ever would have if I didn’t prove by my example that black ones could be as good as the best white ones – and if I didn’t do it throughout the course of the litigation. I was a symbol for every black modeler before me and all of those to come – if any. That much was obvious to anyone who looked at the case. The most far-reaching and the least apparent symbolism had to do with my age. I was a symbol for every salaried worker my age or older that Ford was trying to slide to the middle of the curve or below.   

I thought often of the first woman to pilot a Navy fighter jet. She crashed into the aircraft carrier she was trying to land on. When Calvin heard how she died he told me that he didn’t think it would have happened to a man because a man would not have been under the same pressure to land. He would have pulled up, gone around and tried it again. No big deal for a guy. Very big deal for the Navy’s first female carrier pilot. 

It ain’t easy being a symbol.