This 1955 AUTO DESIGN hierarchical chart below details a worldwide standard of modern auto making. Every car manufacturer today has an "automobile design department " modeled after the exact template Designer-Earl perfected and established well over fifty years ago. 

Without this maverick car architect, there simply would be no universal organized profession known today as "car styling" and or "automobile design." Yes, imagine there not being any individual vice presidents of design at General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes Benz, Opel, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, etc... So, it's kind of staggering to visualize what the world would be like (these days)...without them and the millions of works they put on the roads each year! No doubt we would all be driving something radically different compared to what everyone drives today in the dawn of the 21st century.

POWER STRUCTURE

A peculiar but accurate metaphor a journalist used back in 1955 to describe the original auto design leader was, “GM’s Harley Earl is located somewhere between God and the president, but without the latter’s limitations.” The General Motors Corporation organizational chart, shown below, indicates where "STYLING" was located. This was where Earl liked to run the direction of how all GM's products were being designed in the modern era.

Yes, other great leaders of GM, back then, were impressed with the fact Earl didn't need to get "all the credit" for his invention(s) and knew he enjoyed hiding out inside this giant corporation's labyrinth. GM's top cadre of leaders understood why this man wanted to keep his artistic immunity and or his anonymity sacred...they knew it might certainly have caused pandemonium if GM had ever put out a press release saying how they had an individual who was blazing significant trails of art, engineering and science (that Earl had created a hybrid engineering department) responsible for all GM's new designs that if you ever fully examined this new process...was every bit as innovative to what Leonardo da Vinci was doing 500 years before. After all, Harley Earl literally invented the new art form of automotive design in the modern era! 

GM's great mid-twentieth-century leaders all understood what was at stake and knew they owed a tremendous debt of gratitude to this all-new kind of auto innovator...since he was making them all so much money designing GM's products so successfully. Let's not forget, the area Earl pioneered became the one department where all of GM's most important trade secrets would come from for the rest of the 20th century. Sure, this is a huge statement...but its true. Make sure you examine the pie chart information further down at this section; although its homespun, it clearly establishes a new way of perceiving the modern automotive world's central universe: DESIGN!

But since Earl's death in 1969, most automotive insiders have been taught by the gang of leaders who followed in Harley Earl's footsteps at GM to say something entirely different, "oh, that Harley Earl was just a "stylist, who's greatest claim to fame is that he was the father of the tail fin trend." These self-same detractors also don't know (or even worse, don't care or cherish) American auto history facts. Mainly, that this one individual was the very "first designer" who ever became a vice president of any large worldwide company. As a matter of fact, most auto execs today have no idea that the entire time Mr. Earl was blazing all these important new trails in Detroit, he quietly ruled the automotive design profession and drove it forward.

Harley Earl enjoyed hiding out inside this giant corporation; it always allowed him to keep his sacred anonymity. Chart examples below are crude, but make a distinct point on the seminal moment on where and how the "automobile design" profession became so enormously powerful in America's motor car industry. Remember, Harley was the first to literally create Detroit's dependency on design.