Rick Wagoner American Quotations

History shows you don't know what the future brings.

I remember very clearly at the first budget review having a pretty direct conversation with the head of manufacturing... We began to get huge improvements in productivity and responsiveness. I got a chance to see that firsthand.

Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning.

We don't always agree on stuff, but when it's time to blow the whistle and start the game, we're not still debating.

A lot of other things come along with Chapter 11, which basically end up in a lot of pain.

We believe in fair exchange rates and Japan doesn't practice that. They have massive U.S. dollar reserves, and they use them to intervene regularly.

This is a game that's going to play as long as you're playing it. It's never going to end. It'll go until I retire, and when the next person has the job, they'll be on it too.

I'm not sure we think it's a win to talk about what you're taking out.

I'm like Sergeant Schultz, I know nothing. We are trying to share ideas around the world. We don't just come up with a great idea in Brazil and ignore it in the rest of the world.

The big and the fast beat the small and the fast. If you check out the NBA today, they're big and fast.

Generally, cars were not built to sit on dealer lots. It encourages the wrong kind of behavior in the whole system.

There was an almost an 80% decline one year from 640,000 vehicles to 200,000, and now it's grown back. Our share has grown a lot.

All this improvement is great, but all that does is get us in the game to play for improvements that we need in the future, so that we can be aggressive in the marketplace.

Ford, as I understand it, had done away with the concept of regional management, and now they've re-introduced that in Europe, so it's kind of a two-way street.

There's been a consistency of approach and a consistency of execution. Moving to a common system and common metrics has really helped us.