Our department was logically organized back in the day. Of course, that didn’t last…
If a wise man once said that change was the only constant, then he surely must have been privy to Volvo’s organizational charts during my career there. In the 1980s, the Product Engineering and Development department in which I worked included a Governmental Affairs subgroup, which was responsible for ensuring that Volvo’s current offerings met all applicable current regulations (Product Compliance) and for representing the company in matters related to proposed safety and emissions standards (Governmental Affairs).
Both of those groups worked quite closely on a daily basis with their counterparts in Gothenburg, as you would expect, and were quite successful in keeping Volvo’s good name and reputation front and center with agencies such as NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), the EPA, and their California counterpart, CARB (the California Air Resources Board), among others.
The product planning side of the department consisted of a small Business Analysis group, charged with monitoring and reporting on external economic factors (both within and beyond the auto industry) which could affect Volvo’s business, a Technological Analysis section whose engineers researched new materials, components, or systems which could be of interest to Gothenburg, and finally, the Product Management section, where I worked, responsible for tracking our current product program and suggesting improvements thereto, proposing future market segments which might be appropriate for a Volvo entry, and monitoring competitive product programs, suggesting countermeasures if necessary.
If that last sounds a bit cloak-and-dagger, I assure you that no corporate espionage was involved. Our colleagues at the other import brands headquartered in Northern New Jersey were engaged in similar activities. In fact, test cars were frequently exchanged with Volkswagen/Audi, BMW, Alfa Romeo, Renault, and, on occasion, Mercedes-Benz, if we needed to peruse a would-be competitor more closely. Procuring cars for testing and/or teardown in Gothenburg also fell within our purview; everything from early-production Cadillac Sevilles and Dodge Caravans to C4 Corvettes were purchased, driven locally until their first scheduled dealer service, and then shipped to Sweden for their evaluation.
An early Dodge Caravan, the twin of the one we bought and sent to Sweden. As I recall, my first reaction on driving it was “S–t, our station wagons are dead.” My prediction was somewhat premature, however. (Source: www.businessinsider.com)
By the mid-1990s, as the Monitoring and Concept Center in Camarillo, California had staffed up and assumed Volvo’s “future-tech” and exploratory design responsibilities for North America, our own Technical Analysis group was disbanded. As VMCC also had longer-term business analysis responsibility, our own Business Analysis group was repurposed, focusing on generating and interpreting shorter-term market research and orchestrating “product clinics” where near-future Volvos were positioned alongside current competitors for static evaluation by potential customers.
The Product Management group also evolved, as new “carline manager” positions were tasked with the responsibility to monitor the market reception for their respective models (for example, the 940/960 series and the then-new 850 carline), relaying dealer feedback and potential customer-satisfaction issues back to their Gothenburg counterparts for action. I was moved into the position of 240 Carline Manager to oversee the last (1993) model year for that evergreen car, which brought the 240 Classic to fruition, described in my earlier post.
The ’90s brought some changes in the Product Planning group, but the new Carline Management concept worked well…
In retrospect, those organizational changes were mere ripples in a stream compared with the tsunami resulting from Ford Motor Company’s purchase of Volvo in April 1999. Along with Aston Martin, Jaguar, and Land Rover (and briefly, Lincoln and Mercury), the sales and marketing arms of those brands were relocated to southern California, presumably to enable 24/7 access to SoCal’s fabled car culture in its many permutations.
By the summer of 2001, Volvo had left its governmental affairs, service, and field engineers in Rockleigh, and our sales, distribution, and marketing groups moved into new digs on the second floor of a new, multi-story, LEED-certified edifice in Irvine. It was the headquarters of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group, a collection of disparate non-, near-, and full-luxury brands with which Dearborn hoped to achieve increased market coverage, enhanced prestige, and improved profitability.
From cars to tacos. The Premier Automotive Group HQ is now Taco Bell’s home base. (Source:
The cross-country move also provided the involved brands with the opportunity for internal house cleaning in the form of early retirement programs or outright severance packages for those who did not wish to relocate. That in turn was the impetus for significant organizational changes, not least in our department.
While our former Government Affairs colleagues still enjoyed only a six-hour time difference with their Swedish colleagues, we were now forced to deal with a nine-hour margin, effectively eliminating the possibility of direct communication with Sweden during a normal business day.
And our product planning section was also radically restructured. Instead of carline managers being responsible for entire Volvo model “families”, the new approach now entailed managers for Volvo’s S-range (sedans), V-range (station wagons), XC-range (the “cross country” wagons and forthcoming SUVs), and the C-range (the C70 convertible and forthcoming C30 hatchback), as well as two “uber-managers” to whom the S/V/XC/C folks reported. As an additional wrinkle, the sedan and wagon segments were further divided into “core” (higher-volume) and “niche” (low-volume) groups.
For clarity, I’ve left out the two Product Planning uber-managers, who sat above the “bodystyle” managers in this round of changes…
Ideally, this new “hypermatrix” organization would have resulted in improved information sharing and consensus-building among the managers responsible for, say, a sedan and station wagon which shared a specific car platform. They would have been obliged to reach agreement on proposed product changes or strategic enhancements which would have been applied to both body-styles. They also would have had to ensure that any new direction they proposed was aligned with Volvo’s overall short-term product strategy, down to the level of sales incentives allocated to a particular model during a specific time period…
In reality, that didn’t always happen. I was lucky enough to head up my own small Product Strategy group, focused on improving the cadence and competitiveness of our future product programs. Of course, that meant that I had my own headaches with some of our new owner’s product-development processes and methodology. That’s a story for another time…
And, as to the title in the featured image from July 1976 which predicted “100,000 sales a year” in the U.S. during the 1980s? It took a few more years, but Volvo achieved and surpassed that goal in ’85, ’86, ’87, and ’89 (missing the mark in CY88 by less than 500 units).
We’re rarely privy to business-side machinations of the car companies, so this purview is very interesting.
May I note the correct name for the HQ city is Goteborg (Uttaburry) when my family is from., For some reasons the Swedes Anglicize the name sometimes and sometimes not, unsure why.