The two wonderfully informative GM print ads, detailed in the page below, are from the mid-1950s and contain vital information on the far-reaching extent of Harley Earl's industrial arts movement (a.k.a. "car design"). This business area played an enormous role in taking GM up the market share ladder and auto leaders of GM, Ford and Chrysler today should borrow from this historical material and naturally use it to reignite and turn around America's "winning passion" in the auto capital today. Like nothing else, it streamlines and embraces what made Motordom great in the first place...in modern times. One has to remember, this is not a story about ancient American history, for the historically chronicled information here was the foremost pace-setting ingredient our nation's auto capital originally used in our society and culture, as their No. 1 leading business paradigm, fifty years ago! 

Detroit's leaders need to pursue a new direction to gain market share for the North America's automobile industry.

This September 30, 2002 VIEWPOINT by an editor-at-large of AdAge magazine is a great write up, but it is incomplete.

The “Here Is What It Is, What It Does, How To Use It, How It Works and Why You’ll Want It” part of this dynamic Detroit Story has simply never been told. In essence, how Harley Earl created the auto industry’s dependency on design is a huge piece of the modern piece of the story-telling pie on what makes the central universe of the entire global auto industry tick today. But nobody, not even legions of Detroit ’s finest engineers and highest paid auto execs know anything about it. Yes, this is a huge distortion in history…and how it got this way is one of the best stories never told.

After all, it was mainly because of this man’s inventing a “new profession" for the auto world and how Earl first created a design monopoly inside GM that needs to be entirely fleshed out. Mr. Earl brought a new blueprint to Detroit he was first using in California and General Motors was the first large auto maker to exploit Earl's revolutionary new way of making cars. In doing so, the Auto Design Profession was the primary ingredient to cement GM near a fifty percent market share for decades of time. Again, if most leaders inside the American auto world don't understand much about the man who championed a whole network of advanced rules and principles along with the innovative engineering techniques that ignited a revolution to take place on how cars were built, marketed and sold in Detroit…how on earth can members of America's auto capital ever take a shot at returning to the prosperous days gone by when almost every major auto exec in Detroit knew all about how this process increased their profits and secured the upward trending direction for America's auto makers "gaining" market share?

Detroit needs to wake up...fast! The one quote below, by Rothenberg, explains why we need to further explore the rudimentary techniques of this one business leader, "Harley Earl designed cars that were "symbols of a massive public fantasy to which most of the citizens of the United States subscribed, and to which a large part of the rest of the world aspired."