Term Paper on "Commemorative Speech Why American Cars Were Failing"

Term Paper 5 pages (1419 words) Sources: 3 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Commemorative Speech

Why American cars were failing in the 1970s

Lee Iacocca's success at Chrysler and Ford

America needs another Iacocca

Early Life

Immigrant Parents

Early Jobs

Wagon at grocery store

Fruit selling

Education

Not allowed to serve in WWII

Lehigh and Princeton

Ford Success

Mustang

Baby boom trends

Younger drivers

Women drivers -- the 'two car home'

Wealthier suburban Americans

President of Ford

Unusual because of background and religion

IV Chrysler

million bail out -- loan

K-car and mini-van success

The need for a new Iacocca

Commemorative Speech: Lee Iacocca

Toyota dominates the American market. Gas prices are soaring. There is a crisis in the Middle East of epic proportions. The worldwide demand for American cars has curled up and died and even American consumers are turning in droves to fuel-efficient Japanese models. An accurate portrait of the America automobile market today? Perhaps, but I'm talking about America in the early 1980s. Thanks to the inspired leadership of Lee Iacocca, Chrysler skyrocketed to the forefront of the auto industry once again, when industry analysts were writing the company's obituary. As he had once shown far-reaching vision at Ford, making Ford the number one car manufacturer in America with the 'pony car' known as the Mustang, vanquishing General Motors new dominance -- in the 1980s Iacocca set a new, positive direction for Chrysler.

Iacocca's success story is a classic American immigrant story. Although you all probably know him as Lee, Lee Iacocca was born Lido a. Iacocca on October 25, 1924 to Italian immigrant parents. His father only had a 4th grade education and pushed a hot dog wagon, sold real estate, and ran a rental car business -- anything to make ends meet. Ten-year-old Lee struggled to help his family by taking odd jobs. He often offered to help shoppers at the local grocery store by using his little red wagon to pull their groceries home, hoping to get a tip, which he would give to his mother. You could say this was Lee's first success 'on wheels.' At sixteen Lee worked sixteen-hour days in a neighborhood fruit market while still excelling in school (Swinfin, 2007).

The Great Depression hit the Iacocca family hard, but through the kind of frugality Lee would later show at Chrysler, they survived. Lee said that it was at the family table that he learned to hate waste of any kind -- cutting Chrysler fat, cutting costs -- good business sense learned early on in Lee's life. Then, when Lee tried to enlist in the army to fight in World War II, he was classified as 4F, unfit to serve because of the rheumatic fever he suffered as a child. But he persevered and got a scholarship to Lehigh University, even without the financial help of the GI bill. His goal was simple, quantifiable, and direct, just like the later goals and benchmarks he would make for Chrysler. He would make $10,000 a year by the time he was twenty-five, a considerable sum at the time, and then progress to becoming a millionaire (Swinfin, 2007). Nothing could dampen young Iaccoca's resolve -- not depression, war, rejection, or the constant threat of poverty. He was like an unstoppable force of nature.

After graduating from Lehigh University with a degree in engineering, Lee went on to Princeton, where he had won the Wallace Memorial Fellowship. Then, he got a job as an engineer with the Ford Motor Company, one of the worldwide leaders in car manufacturing at the time. Ford's dominance, however, was being threatened by General Motors. At Ford, he became known as the Father of the Mustang, the model that saved Ford's image and propelled it to the top of the car-manufacturing heap once again.

Lee always had his eye on current market trends. He predicted number of car-buying young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four would increase, based upon post-war 'baby boom' demographic trends. He also noted that more Americans were moving to the suburbs. He saw this would mean an increase in two car families, and more women would be buying cars, which meant that color, design, and shape would become a more important factor in deciding what car to buy -- no more of the 'any color you… READ MORE

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