Get it? The white collar workers who design the cars have to move from artisan to engineer, and they need to work together across all the company's platforms to use common parts.

While cutting healthcare benefits and union concessions might help conserve another month or two of cash, neither would address the causal differences between old school manufacturers and those from a new school focused on white collar efficiency and cross-process visibility.

But this type of change doesn't come on the cheap. It requires imagination and determination. Imagination to re-think the details of what we do and how it's measured. Determination to take on the entrenched interests inside our companies and drive change right down to the desktop of every white collar worker. So far, these failures haven't only resulted in the Big 3 crisis and all the related manufacturing meltdowns over the last 30 years, they've also caused the mess on Wall Street.

In Michael Lewis' terrific article in Portfolio.com, "The End Of Wall Street's Boom," he highlights the two key drivers of the banking meltdown. First was the huge, unseen risk of leverage in the new financial products that were being developed. Second, in the article's money quote, John Gutfreund , the former Solomon CEO, reflected on the role of CEOs across all of today's megabanks. He said, "I didn't understand all the product lines, and they don't either." Lewis writes "the Wall Street C.E.O. [has] no real ability to keep track of the frantic innovation occurring inside his firm."

CEOs and everyone below them must have a common understanding and visibility into the processes needed to establish new efficiencies. As an example, it's rumored that Toyota's engineers spend more than half their time "doing engineering." In Detroit, it's half that. And as Lewis points out, few people anywhere knew that a single mortgage was leveraged up to 10x through the various CDOs and credit swaps.