(2 of 2)
Rank & Fashion. Lyons spends most of his time in the Coventry works, is usually on the floor from 9 a.m. "until the work is finished, even if it's midnight." In Britain's often unimaginative industrial hierarchy, bustling Bill Lyons sticks out, looks and talks more like a Detroit auto builder. A three-time visitor to the U.S., he has picked up Yankee ways, pops out press releases that would make a sedate company like Rolls-Royce quiver in embarrassment. Sample: "Mr. Clark Gable has [owned four] Jaguars; Mr. Adam Gimbel has two ... To visit the New York showroom is to court the possibility of rubbing shoulders with many notabilities of rank and fashion . . ."
Lyons himself mainly rubs shoulders with the highly paid, highly skilled workers in his huge plant. No detail escapes his cost-conscious eye. When a foreman built himself a partitioned office for his paper work, Lyons tore it down. "A foreman should be on the floor," he said, "pushing blokes to do things." Added Lyons: "If I let him have his office, he'll soon want a girl to do typing for him. Next it will be another girl to assist the first one; before you knew where you were, you'd have six people in each department, sitting on their can for no bloody reason at all." Motormaker Bill Lyons understands better than anyone else that only by top efficiency can he possibly compete with U.S. cars on their home ground.