On November 2, 1978, Lee joined Chrysler and on the very same day, the company announced a 3rd quarter loss of almost $160 million, the worst deficit in its history. The organizational structure alone made Iacocca cringe. Chrysler was structured as a cluster of smaller departments loosely connected to the center. There was no system of meetings to get different parts of the company in order to regularly communicate with each other. Chrysler needed to embrace the idea of Newton’s Third Law of Motion – that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The engineers failed to interact with the manufacturing division so they were not able to understand how a product could work. Manufacturing and engineering need to work together. Riccardo and Bill McGagh the treasurer were constantly running from bank to bank in order to ensure that the Chrysler loans were intact. Even worse, the Chrysler cars were lousy, the morale was bad and the factories were deteriorating. If Iacocca had known all this going in, he would not have joined Chrysler as its CEO.
