The Cowboy Driving Olds

By William McWhirter/Detroit

JOHN ROCK HAS NEVER FITTED THE GENERAL MOTORS MOLD, EVEN though he spent 32 years as a GM troubleshooter in posts all over the world. He always refused to join a country club, instead preferring to build roads and dig wells on his 185-acre Montana spread. He seldom hid his differences with GM's top brass, often phrasing his protests in barnyard epithets. Last year, when he found himself sidelined in a staff job, the restless Rock prepared to take one of GM's early-retirement packages.

But Rock was just the kind of maverick that GM's new president, Jack Smith, was looking for last spring to join his team of bureaucracy busters. Rock's daunting assignment was to revive the company's most broken-down division: Oldsmobile. The nameplate, founded in 1897, was once renowned for powerful roadsters equipped with big V-8s like the Rocket 88. But the modern Oldsmobile suffered from an enervating loss of identity and fell disastrously in annual sales from 1 million cars in 1986 to less than 400,000 currently. Olds tried to entice younger buyers with the ad slogan "This is not your father's Oldsmobile," but it succeeded only in alienating older drivers.

"We sold a bunch of poor-quality cars that broke their promise to the customers. Some of our youngest Cutlass owners got hurt most of all," admits Rock. "If we had kept it up, we were really going to end up as our father's Oldsmobile. Business as usual was eventually going to take us out of business."

The son of a Chevrolet dealer in South Dakota, Rock earned a degree in psychology before embarking on a career that included posts at Buick and GMC Truck. At Oldsmobile, Rock began his revolution at the retail level, where he exhorted his dealers to emphasize customer service. He plans for Oldsmobile to become the first mainstream GM line to adopt the methods of the new Saturn division, which embraces higher standards of value, quality and service than other nameplates.

Following the Saturn example, the Oldsmobile division plans to produce some new models that will bear no mention of the Olds name or its rocket logo. The first will be Aurora, a full-size sedan that will go on sale in 1994. While GM may continue to de-emphasize the Oldsmobile nameplate, the company has no plans to shut down the division entirely, contrary to rumors that it might do so. In its new guise, Olds plans to concentrate on midsize cars to compete with the likes of the Ford Taurus and Toyota Camry, giving up most of the big- car market to Buick and Cadillac.

Why such a radical step? "We were the only environment that was ready for a complete change. All they needed was a cowboy dumb enough to say he'd do it," says Rock. "America's oldest nameplate is going to become America's newest car company." But Rock is a smart enough cowboy to recognize that his challenge is a tall one.