General Motors’ “Cowboy” Rides Off into the Sunset

General Motors’ “Cowboy” Rides Off into the Sunset

By Michelle Krebs November 19, 2007

Few true characters have filled the automotive industry’s top ranks, but John Rock, the former General Motors executive who put GMC on a growth path and later tried to resuscitate Oldsmobile, was one of those.

Rock, 71, died Friday after a brief illness at his ranch in South Dakota, where he’d grown up, the son of a Chevrolet dealer.

A hulk of a man, Rock strode into a room like a cowboy, commanding everyone’s attention by his very presence. His talk was as straight as a cowboy’s shot -- and every bit as salty.

Anyone who knew Rock, in fact, immediately recounts the famous John Rock angry cowboy story.

In fall of 1992, GM teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Washington Post writer Warren Brown snagged a GM board member, who told him, among other things, that Oldsmobile was history.

GM execs and public relations staff caught wind of Brown’s potentially damaging scoop and made plans for a rebuttal via a two-way teleconference to GM staffers and dealers as well as reporters.

Over lunch before the teleconference, Rock told his colleagues that he ought to just look into the camera and exclaim some profanities. He got a chuckle.

Rock’s opening remarks on the teleconference were followed by a question-and-answer period with the Post’s Brown first up, defending his article.

Rock told Brown he wasn’t challenging what he’d written, but, he looked into the camera just as he said he should at lunch and responded: “Goddammit, you are looking at one pissed off cowboy, and you’re trying to shoot my horse from under me.”

Brown wasn’t the only one who got the friendly jab from Rock. After a press conference at which Rock outlined where Oldsmobile was and where it wanted to go, a reporter eagerly asked the first question. Exactly what the question was, no one recalls. They only remember Rock’s response: “That’s the stupidest f…ing question I’ve ever heard.”

Uproarious laughter erupted, to the utter humiliation of the reporter. Later, Rock slung his arm across the reporter’s shoulder and strolled off to the hospitality suite for a beer like they were long-lost buddies.

Success at GMC Success

Few people knew the automobile business better than Rock. He’d grown up in it and stayed in it for 40 years.

"He had a tremendous intellect about the business," Gus Buenz, Oldsmobile's public relations chief during the Rock era, told AutoObserver. "He was one of the smartest guys I knew in all aspects of the business."

Rock learned to sell cars at his father’s Chevy dealership. After earning a degree in psychology from the University of Minnesota, Rock went to work as a Buick district manager. He held a number of sales and marketing posts at Buick, in the GM corporate staff and at GM’s Holden subsidiary in Australia.

In the early 1980s, Rock was put in charge of GMC, a post for which he seemed well suited since the division sold only trucks.

In fact, Rock enjoyed considerable success at GMC. The division grabbed the attention of younger buyers with niche high-performance SUV and pickup truck models that Rock fought like hell to have made. The move gave some pizzazz that set GMC apart from the giant Chevy Truck operation. GMC posted higher sales during Rock’s tenure.

Righting the Oldsmobile Titanic

Rock’s success at GMC earned him the job as head of Oldsmobile. But righting the sinking Oldsmobile, which during the 1980s generated more than 1 million vehicle sales a year – mostly Cutlass Supremes – but had slumped to about a third of its size by the 1990s -- was tougher, and Rock quickly recognized the challenge.

Buenz recalled in Rock’s early days at the then Lansing, Mich.-based division, Rock was househunting. The real estate agent showed him expensive houses befitting a man of his professional status.

“I’ve been looking at these expensive houses, and they are not a lot of damn Oldsmobiles in the garages,” Rock told his staffers at one of their first meetings. “How can you be a hero anywhere else, if you can’t be a hero in your hometown?”

Commented Buenz: “He summarized the situation better than anybody else I’d seen even if it was in his colloquial way.”

Oldsmobile - Saturn Style

Despite the challenge, Rock gave it a shot. The plan was to copy Saturn with a product portfolio of vehicles that took on the Japanese imports, specifically Toyota and Honda, and sell them at Saturn-style no-haggle prices.

It was during that time that Oldsmobile launched the flagship Aurora, a sexy car that was groundbreaking in that it didn’t carry the Oldsmobile nameplate on it. The Oldsmobile name, it was decided, carried too much bad baggage.

At the New York auto show, the brash Rock insisted the Aurora would have top-notch quality – not like theirs,  he said pointing to the neighboring display where then Chrysler Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, another of the industry's rare characters, was showing off the Neon, already socked with multiple recalls.

Lutz, who now is vice chairman at GM, shot off a letter saying we don’t have to beat up on each other, we get enough of that from everyone else. Rock returned an apology note.

Time Runs Out on Oldsmobile – and Rock

There were signs that the Oldsmobile division was making headway in attracting the targeted customer – there just weren’t enough of them. Time and patience ran out on Oldsmobile -- and Rock.

In the fall of 1996, Rock was called abruptly into a meeting with his boss, Ron Zarrella, then executive vice president and president of GM North America. Not a very popular chap, Zarrella, with no automotive background, had tried to instill Procter & Gamble style brand management into GM and recruited his own non-auto marketing minions to make it happen.

Rock knew Zarrella wanted to broom him out of the way. But before Zarrella could say a word at the meeting, Rock told Zarrella if it is in the best interest of Oldsmobile for him to leave, no conversation is necessary. He’d step down from Oldsmobile and move toward his retirement from GM. “I’m not going to get in a pissing contest,” he reportedly told Zarrella.

Rock told his confidants that Zarrella, who later got swept out himself for his bungled job and was replaced by Lutz, breathed a sigh of relief and grinned.

Rock wasn’t so gracious later, when Oldsmobile – then America’s oldest existing vehicle nameplate that had just celebrated its centennial - was declared officially dead in December 2000. He was quoted as saying something along the lines of “goddammit we worked hard, we spent umpteen million dollars for a great product line and supporting nearly 3,000 dealers. Why not get rid of Saturn, it hasn’t made a goddam penny, and it only has 300 some dealers.”

He was advised to tone it down. By then, Rock had moved aside at Oldsmobile to let his friend and colleague from his early Buick days, Darwin Clark, do the dirty work of shuttering Oldsmobile and sheeding nearly 3,000 angry dealers. Rock took a special assignment until he retired a few months later.

Now, as Buenz said to a former colleague of Rock’s death. “Our favorite cowboy has ridden off into sunset of life.” 

Michelle Krebs:  is Editor-in-Chief of AutoObserver.com. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.