Quote Of The Day: Rattner's Regret Edition

We liked Fritz. We felt that Fritz had more energy and more drive and got the message that things had to change and was being groomed to be CEO and deserved a chance… He’s shown that he can manage. Whether he can fundamentally change the culture of the company is another matter.

Bloomberg’s fresh sound bite from former car czarlet Steve Rattner. Well, considering you left him in charge, Steve, he’d damn well better change the culture of the company. Otherwise it reflects just as badly on the restructuring task force as it does on GM, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, picking Fritz because he had “more drive” than Rick Wagoner wasn’t really a good setup for fundamental culture change, was it? You don’t hire Larry to move your piano because he’s “higher energy” than Moe. But it’s not Rattner’s fault: GM’s inability to change its culture comes from its inability to hire the professionals. Which means Ken “the pay czar” Feinberg and his ridiculous pay limits are really to blame.

To jeopardize the return on that investment over whether, I don’t mean to sound cavalier, but over whether some CEO has a $500,000 base salary or a $750,000 base salary strikes me as very short-sighted

Oh, nice. So Rattner kept Fritz, trusting that he’d have bags of taxpayer bullion to pay an outsider replacement? That was really the plan? I don’t mean to sound cavalier, but leaving the guy who was in charge of what you called “the worst finance operation I’ve ever seen” at the top of GM wasn’t Ken Feinberg’s fault. If an unelected official is firing CEOs, the replacement shouldn’t be chosen based on relative merit to a guy who’d been running his company into the ground for nearly a decade.