For decades, big corporate profits were blasted as a sign of greed, especially by unions. GM changed all that. When a sheep dipped GM, free of legacy finance costs, and not paying taxes due to losses a normal company would not have been able to carry over after a bankruptcy, declared a record $7.6 billion profit in 2011, chests of GM boosters swelled with pride, as if the profits had been theirs. A year later, there is $2.7 billion less to be proud of. GM’s European millstone, Opel, continues to drag the company down. Opel’s operative losses more than doubled to $1.8 billion for all of 2012.

GM reported as $4.9 billion profit for 2012, and “a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter profit on Thursday, citing wider losses in Europe and lower vehicle prices in its core North American market,” says Reuters. Analysts had hoped GM would do better.

The situation in Europe is expected to be getting worse. CFO Dan Ammann told Reuters that “GM still sees industry sales in Europe declining in 2013 and is “not betting on” a pickup later in the year.”

GM wrote down $5.2 billion worth of assets in Europe. GM’s $423 million investment for a 7 percent stake in Peugeot, is now carried at half price on GM’s books. Ammann said that GM has “no intention of putting more cash into Peugeot.”

The Nikkei [sub] comes with the good news that “Japan’s automakers have finally resolved the inventory shortages that have hindered their sales in the U.S. market.” According to the Tokyo wire, Japan’s automakers “are in a better position to compete with their Western and Korean rivals,” now that lots are stocked again.

Well, not quite. Japanese inventories are still fashionably slim compared to some Detroit chubbos. Pop some Tums and have a look.

According to data compiled by Automotive News, Honda has a 54 day supply. Around two months are considered normal for the industry.  Toyota however has only a 32 day supply, smaller Subaru has 30.

Let’s take this opportunity to look at all lots.

The Detroit 3 definitely have no shortage of cars with an average of 70 days’ supply on the lots. The Europeans are at the current industry average with 53 days of supply. The Japanese have 43 days’ worth  on the lots, but “the Koreans” have only 27 days.

Indeed, Hyundai-Kia’s supply is the lowest of them all with only 27 days until empty. As indicated by the Detroit 3 number, American makers are generously stocked, but averages can be deceiving.

Ford and Chrysler carry a regulation two month supply on the books.

The absolutely worst of Detroit is GM with a nearly three month supply. Only consolation: Deadman walking Mitsubishi carries two days more. While days to sell are down industry-wide, inventory is increasing on GM lots: From March to April, it took a week longer to move an already sluggish inventory.

GM’s lot queens: Escalade EXT (144 days), Yukon (136 days), Yukon XL (133 days), Sierra (132 days), CTS (124 days), all Cadillac cars (123 days), all Buicks (121 days).

Have a look at this chart: No wonder that GM is losing market share. The cars are all sitting on the lot.

Rather than running commercials during the Super Bowl, General Motors is looking to try something more subversive – product placement within other brand’s TV spots during the big game.

Automotive News reports that GM marketing man Joel Ewanick was investigating the possibility of paying other advertisers to insert GM vehicles into their ads. But various contractual elements related to Super Bowl advertising may kill the idea in its nascent stages.

Super Bowl ads are apparently restricted via a form of non-compete clause. Ford and Chevrolet could not run ads in the same “pod” (i.e. commercial break), and GM’s plan would cause havoc with this arrangement. Having GM products inserted into another company’s ad, as well as commercials for GM’s own products would cause a logistical nightmare for the people who decide where and when ads are placed.

Furthermore, the plan would run afoul of a long-standing policy against buying a 30 second spot and then re-selling 5 or 10 second blocks of time. NBC, which broadcasts the game, would also have to approve any ads that feature the promotion of an unrelated brand. The article also mentions a “reward system” that would give small prizes to viewers who are able to spot product placements, though no details on this seemingly silly scheme were given.

As much as Super Bowl ads have become a part of pop culture, meriting their own examination, the undeniable fact remains that for many, the ads are a great way to grab another beer or, shall we say, recycle the liquids via the municipal sewage system.

Mary Barra, GM’s product chief, told the DetN and an assemblage of Wall Street analysts that by 2018, “GM hopes to build 90 percent of its vehicles on 14 platforms — half the number now — and boost manufacturing efficiency by 40 percent.” Not to nitpick, but if you build 90 percent of your vehicles on 14 platforms, then you can’t build the remaining 10 percent on thin air and you will need more platforms for low volume cars. So we talked a bit to GM to find out more about how they will go from zaftig to svelte.

The basic story is that GM is trying to streamline its “too many variations in the types of engines and vehicle underpinnings,” and this is a good thing.

Currently, only a third of GM’s volume comes from cars that share what GM calls “core architectures.”  The rest sits on a hodgepodge of what GM charitably calls “regional architectures.” Currently, there are 30 “Core Architectures” and an untold number of regional dishes.

In the future, GM’s local chefs will have to use a common cookbook.  By 2014, in the world of cars that is tomorrow, the number of “Core Architectures” will shrink to 24, but the global volume that uses these core architectures will grow to 62 percent. Four years later, by 2018, all regional architectures will have vanished. The number of global architectures will have shrunk to 14. Those 14 global architectures will serve 90 percent of the volume.

But again, what about the remaining 10 percent? “There are a few cars that have a unique architecture, which they share with nobody,” explains Klaus-Peter Martin, GM spokesman in Detroit. As examples, he names the Chevrolet Corvette and some vehicles produced with GM’s JV partners in China.

Likewise, the number of engine platforms will shrink from currently around 20 to less than 10 in 2018. Keep in mind theses are engine platforms, which allow a multitude of engines.

GM expects global efficiency gains between 35 and 40 percent from this, which is a tall order. But if you look at how little global commonality there is currently in the world of GM, those numbers should be doable. With a lot of screaming from the natives.

Michelle Krebs of Edmunds says “it’s the course a lot of manufacturers are taking. Everyone is trying to get to greater economies of scale.”

Volkswagen for instance is moving away from platform-think and goes to its new kit architecture. This allows a much higher number of different cars with different character, built from modules. Object-oriented car design, if you will.  On a smaller scale, BMW creates a number of engines, gasoline and diesel, from one building block, a single, standardized cylinder.

This industry takes huge investments, and spreading them across as many units as possible is the name of the game. If you make the most from the least, you win. Don’t think “badge engineering” when you hear this. If done right, the slimdown can make the offerings more attractive, and can help the brand(s) gain sex-appeal. That of course remains in the eye of the beholder. If you like the right lady, you’ll complain that the left one is the wrong one.

when speaking with old friends at Ford and GM, the level of mutual distaste for each other is very high…it seems to be getting personal. Lots of egos involved, [which] increases potential for short-sighted decision-making

At the time, I was willing to chalk up this animosity to the usual industry hyper-competitiveness (or at least a return to form after the lockstep mutual support of the bailout era), but it seems I should have paid more attention to our source’s concerns. As it turns out, the bad feelings between Detroit’s cross-town rivals has apparently gotten worse…

Jalopnik reveals that NYT auto reporter Bill Vlasic’s forthcoming book highlights just how uncivil the Ford-GM rivalry has become:

What [Ford marketing boss] Jim Farley really wanted to do was kick the daylights out of General Motors. “I’m going to beat Chevrolet on the head with bat,” he said with a slightly wicked smile. “And I’m going to enjoy it.” There was a saying going around Ford: GM was like the kid who was born on third base and yells out, “Hey Ma, I hit a triple!” Farley and his fellow Ford executives and workers were ready to rumble.

…This was like the glory days again — Ford versus GM, let the better car company win. “We’re going to beat on them, and it’s going to be fun,” said Farley. “F—- GM. I hate them and their company and what they stand for. And I hate the way they’re succeeding.”

Now I understand why people are forever accusing TTAC of “hating” one car company or another… it seems that behind a thin veneer of professional courtesy, the auto industry nurtures a viciously competitive streak that crosses into hatred and contempt for competitors. What a pity it is that competition isn’t enough any more, and that executives have to “hate what their competitors stands for” to motivate themselves. Isn’t taking pride in your own products and achievements enough?

The Detroit News snagged a lengthy interview with GM CEO Dan Akerson, giving observers one of the first in-depth looks at the man who will be leading The General for the next three to four years. The interview is to lengthy to summarize here, but there are a few items that are worth noting…

For one thing, Akerson has some serious ambitions and doesn’t mind sharing them with the world.

There are a couple milestones in my tenure I want to accomplish. I want to earn $10 billion a year profit. I want get the U.S. pension fund to fully funded — and we’re making real progress there. I want to make Europe profitable on a sustainable basis.

None of these are going to be easy to accomplish. A $10b profit would require a doubling of GM’s performance last year, and the other goals (particularly in regards to the troubled European operations) will divert a huge amount of cash. Meanwhile, the old GM challenge of “culture change” continues to be one of Akerson’s top priorities as well, as he seeks to develop a competitive atmosphere and break down the tradition of “boss worship” which holds back the necessary give-and-take.

But possibly the biggest challenge Akerson faces has to do with GM’s product, and the DetN includes a separate write-up of Akerson’s thoughts on the matter. Speed of development is one of his major changes, and he acknowledges that his desire to pull forward development of the 2013 Chevrolet Malibu faced internal dissent (which he overruled, raising questions about the alleged death of “boss worship” at GM).

On the issue of fuel economy, he argues that the Chevrolet Volt

is a novelty (today), but it won’t be in five years. It’s going to be an old, old technology and old news.

He also says ethanol will “die slowly” and hints that GM will eventually start selling dual-fuel commercial vehicles, capable of running on natural gas or gasoline. Akerson also says that

we’re not going to do these big, heavy trucks that are making 15 miles, 12 miles to a gallon.

Which, given rising CAFE standards and gas prices, comes as no real surprise. It does, however, create some challenges to his goal of $10b annual profits, as much of GM’s profit traditionally comes from the sale of large trucks, and fuel-economy-improvement-related cost increases for pickups are projected to be costly.

Akerson made a few surprising statements on the luxury front, including a perplexing assessment of Cadillac’s next two vehicles, the XTS and ATS, which he says

are not going to blow the doors off, but they will be very competitive.

Whatever that means. And despite his apparent lack of confidence in the next generation of Caddies, he still took a potshot at Ford, saying

They are trying like hell to resurrect Lincoln. Well, I might as well tell you, you might as well sprinkle holy water. It’s over

In general, Akerson comes across as quite candid, possibly overly so (though you won’t hear us complaining about it). But for all his ambitions, he offers relatively little in the way of specific strategies to accomplish them. For example, his desire to make GM more like Toyota is hardly a “strategy,” as every automaker has been studying and trying to replicate Toyota’s success for decades. Speeding up development is an indication of his approach, but it brings with it worries about future quality. Similarly his desire to compete with every Volkswagen model while simultaneously downsizing and restructuring Opel sounds like a tough balancing act. But then, when it comes to turning around a company as large and perennially troubled as GM, ambitious goals and tough strategies are the only way forward.

The auto media has been receiving its advance copies of Bob Lutz’s forthcoming book “Car Guys versus Bean Counters” over the last few weeks, and have been leaking some of the more provocative statements and conclusions from it. I too requested a book and tore through it over the past week, enjoying Lutz’s direct voice and keen insights into his time at General Motors… as well as the attention-grabbing, politically-charged statements that the rest of the media seems so fixated upon. The bad news is that I won’t be able to write a full review until we get closer to its mid-June launch date, but the good news is that our forbearance has been rewarded: despite sideswiping yours truly in one passage, a brief but rewarding email conversation has generated more mutual respect, and Mr Lutz has agreed (in principle) to a TTAC interview to accompany our review at the time of the book’s release. Sometimes observing an embargo is worth it.

But fear not: just because the promise of an interview with one of the most influential figures in the industry has us delaying our review for another month or so, we’ve got more Lutz-related material with which to build up to what I expect to be a watershed interview for TTAC. Next week I’ll be publishing a review of Mr Maximum’s previous book “Guts,” and to kick of the coming months of Lutzmania, we’ve got a very special contest that is sure to stump even TTAC’s most well-versed Best and Brightest.

Shortly after Lutz’s arrival at GM, he began tackling the problem of body panel gaps, which at the time was 5mm with a variation of up to 2mm, a standard that he “complained and complained” about, given that the Germans and Japanese were building cars with smaller gaps and almost no variation. At one point, Lutz attended a large meeting at GM’s Milford Proving Grounds in which he and senior execs from GM’s Product Development, Design, Quality and Manufacturing examined GM’s then-current lineup and compared them to the competition. After some loud complaints about GM’s inability to create crisp panel gaps, Lutz was confronted by the executive in charge of GM’s sheet metal fabrication, who apparently grabbed Lutz by the lapels and raised him up on his toes, saying

OK, I think I’ve heard about as much of this shit as I want to. YOU are now going to take ME to the car that you think is best and we’re going to focus on that one.

Lutz then took him to one of the competitive cars that Lutz thought was the best sheet-metal-wise… which leads us to the question: which car did Lutz identify as having the best sheet metal of the competition? This vehicle became GM’s “new standard for sheet metal,” and learning from it directly improved GM’s sheet metal quality, according to Lutz. So, what was it?

Leave your answer in the comments section, and the first correct answer gets our Lutzian prize: a special booklet and USB storage drive (along with branded packaging) that was handed out to journalists attending the launch of the Chevrolet Volt. In short, your knowledge of GM’s obscure history will gain you a piece of GM’s less-obscure history. Qualifying answers must identify the make, model and generation (expressed in the range of model-years produced or model code, for example “1998-2005 (E46) BMW 3 Series”). This contest is closed to GM employees, members of the auto media or anyone else in possession of an advance copy of “Car Guys”(i.e. show a little honor and don’t cheat).

Good luck!

Even the Detroit News, by some regarded as an extension of the Big 3 PR departments, can’t help but ask: “Are Detroit’s new automakers falling back into old habits?”

New automakers? Old habits?

Well, it sure looks like the Big 3 have drastically ramped-up production. Production of good numbers, that is. Especially one of them has been very busy in that department: GM. The General currently has a 95 day supply of cars sitting on dealer lots, up from 76 days in August.

The industry average stands at 67 days, says a Citi Investment Research report. A two month supply is considered normal. What’s more, carmakers are supposed to switch from rich to lean at this time of the year: “With December production poised for a typical seasonal slowdown, inventory should end the year around the 60-day norm,” Citi analyst Itay Michaeli wrote in his report.

GM’s answer? GM says everything is fine, they are bulking up for a strong 2012. Jim Bunnell, general manager of GM’s dealer networks, doesn’t “want to leave anything on the table. We don’t want to be short.”

The other old and new automakers are a bit more cautious.

Ford has a 71 days’ supply.

Chrysler Group LLC has a 79 days’ supply.

Both higher than the industry, but not alarmingly so.

GM desperately needs better news, and cars stuffed into the channel are considered and reported as sold. For the first 11 months, GM’s sales rose only 7 percent. Whereas Ford rose 19 percent and Chrysler 17. In November, GM’s ”sales,” despite an overstuffed channel, rose only 12 percent. Ford’s sales went up 20 percent and Chrysler’s 17 percent.

What’s more, GM could be within spitting distance of the world’s number one carmaker, Toyota. When global production numbers are counted, it will most likely be a photo finish this year, and every car made counts – even if it sits around unsold.

Good year-end numbers would be good for the newly minted stock. Overstuffing could also be its undoing. “If they don’t get it, then Wall Street will punish them in January,” said Warren Browne, a retired GM executive who now runs his own firm, WP Browne Consulting LLC.

Arthur Ross started in 1935 as a „Creative Designer” at GM. He did Cadillacs and Buicks. He had a hand in drawing the lines of some famous cars of those times, the Cadillac Sixty Special, LaSalle, Fleetwood, and the Buick Y-Job, GM’s first concept car. He also was a pervert.

Now don’t get me wrong. Where I come from, “pervert” is a honorific, and I have been to certain parties where the host proudly walked around with a red sash, inscribed “Hentai-ou.” Which is Japanese for something like “King of the perverts.” All in attendance bowed to him. It’s a Japanese thing.  I’m familiar with harder core environments also.  I worked for Volkswagen during a certain period.  (“Bertel, how many girlfriends do you have?” “Two.” “Sorry, you don’t qualify for a board seat. Get some more.”) But let’s get back to Art Ross.

During the war, Ross was assigned to GM’s Camouflage and War Services Section. War over, he became Chief Designer of Cadillac, then Oldsmobile. Those were the golden years of American car design, and in fourteen years as Chief Designer, Ross literally changed the shape of the industry. In 1958, Ross left GM and started his own design house, Arthur Ross Associates. Remember the Parker Pen? A Ross design. Arthur Ross died in Chicago in 1981.

His estate contained a large body of art Ross had drawn, painted, airbrushed, and magic markered in his free time (and possibly during boring conferences.) It came in two genres.

His traditional art, including portraits, surrealistic paintings, and a treasure of car designs can be found at The Art Of Art Ross.com.

His, how shall I say this, more eclectic art is found at Erotica By Art Ross. Now let me warn you that this is not for the faint of heart. I had to do hours of painstaking research, sifting through his complete body of naked bodies, engaged in various activities, before I found one (and only one) image that is barely SFW. This is Thanksgiving weekend, you are not supposed to be working. You are safe unless your wife has installed snitching software on your home PC. In that case, she already knows about your activities. But once you click on Erotica By Art Ross, you see stuff your mother didn’t dare to warn you about. You have been warned now. I don’t want to hear any complaints.

Ross’s work reflects his fantasies of statuesque blondes, with the occasional BBW thrown in. His most prolific and most pornographic period was during the WW II time – designing new camouflage patterns obviously wasn’t challenging enough to keep his wandering mind focused.

So now we know it: Your father’s Oldsmobile was designed by a dirty young man.

(Side story: I wouldn’t have known, would I not have received mail from our in-house connoisseur of fine Detroitophilia, from our buff-book buff, Mr. Ronnie Schreiber. Strangely, he shied away from writing the piece himself, saying “I figured that it was suitable for B&B (Bertel & Baruth). I’ve only looked at just the home page, so I disclaim any blame if you find something offensive, or not offensive enough.” Sure, Ronnie. I just loved those erudite Playboy interviews.

When you start a new job, it’s considered important to make a good impression. How does the saying go? “Start as you mean to go on”. Well, Dan Akerson, I suspect, tried to heed that advice and ended up putting his foot in it. The Associated Press reports that Dan Akerson, CEO of Government (soon to be “General” again) Motors, presented a webcast to GM employees. The usual CEO rhetoric came out. “GM needs to keep competitors on their heels rather than responding to what they do” said one GM worker, who asked not to be identified as the broadcast was not available to the public; despite being owned by them. “Attack mode” was another phrase used. But then Mr Akerson said that GM’s Cadillac brand has to make cars that are better than BMW’s. Now I thought this was quite a harmless statement to make. The CEO set a (quite high) benchmark to beat. Sounds reasonable, right? Not according to some.

The comment drew the ire of USA Today. As the article said, “How sad if he really said that. He’s echoing the out-of-date bias of many car shoppers. Cadillac, data show, already is better than BMW.” Blimey! Calm down, lads! The article then goes on to quote J.D Power and Associates’ Initial Quality Study (IQS) and Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS). In those studies, Cadillac ranks higher than BMW nearly every year. USA Today then starts ranting about how even “bad” GM (their word, not mine) beat BMW.

“In IQS scores back to 2005, Cadillac finished as high as third of some three dozen brands surveyed, and no worse than 13th (except for 25th in 2007). BMW, meantime, ranked 3rd back in 2005, but since then no better than 16th of about three dozen brands. (The exact number surveyed varies by one or two each year.)”

On the VDS, they mentioned that Cadillac, apart from years 2005 and 2007, beat BMW. Then things started getting hot under the bonnet.

“Sure, but BMW will blow the doors off Cadillac, right? Apparently not. In a “run what ya brung” challenge race last October, Caddy’s CTS-V took first, second and third. The highest-finishing BMW was an M3 in fourth. BMW declined at the time to send a factory-backed car and driver because it was a GM-sponsored event rather than a neutral competitive setting. Still the showdown was open to all production-stock (unmodified) cars, so, theoretically at least, it was a fair fight.”

Now whilst these are all valid points, there’s one point which USA Today doesn’t mention. In August 2010, The US public bought 12,689 Cadillacs. In comparison, 19,450 BMW’s were purchased. So, even with those points which USA Today raised, the US public isn’t buying it, literally. But, I think that USA Today was extremely harsh. I don’t think Dan Akerson meant anything by that comment (if he did say it, GM won’t confirm it). I like bashing a GM CEO as much as the next person, but give him a chance!

Editor’s Note: GM’s outgoing Chairman/CEO Ed Whitacre sent the following email to GM’s senior executives today [via Detroit News]

My goal in coming to General Motors was to help restore profitability, build a strong market position and prepare this iconic company for success. While we have more to do, it is fair to say that GM is headed on that path. Our earnings for the last two quarters show that. Our strong sales show that. And the enthusiasm from everyone I meet at GM shows that.

We are on the right track. And I have complete confidence that Dan Akerson will keep us moving forward. Dan is committed to GM; he’s been a key player in the decisions our Board has made over the last year. He will do a great job, and deserves your complete support.

I have enjoyed my time as CEO of GM more than I can say, and I am pleased to stay on as Chairman through the end of the year. I am excited about this company, and I want you to know that it is the people of GM who make this a very special place. You are the best, and I truly appreciate all you do.

Thank you for the privilege of leading this great company. I am anxious to see the new heights that you will achieve as you continue focusing on designing, building and selling the world’s best vehicles.

Ed Whitacre

Editor’s Note: Legendary auto journalist and TTAC inspiration Jerry Flint died this week. Rather than write a sappy eulogy, we’ve decided to let Jerry speak for himself. What follows is a speech Flint gave to GM employees at Milford Proving Grounds in October 2000. It’s feisty, passionate and deeply insightful… the kind of speech that made Jerry famous, and paved the way for sites like TTAC. Moreover, it shows just how deep GM’s problems run, and serves as a timeless warning against the worst impulses of the business. Rest In Peace Jerry… we will always remember you at your best. [Courtesy: The Olds Zone Hat Tip: Ken Elias]

There was an auto executive, he was a very high ranking GM man.  You all know his name but I won’t mention it because it might embarrass him.  He’s not at General Motors anymore.

I once asked this man what he would do if he found himself the chief executive of General Motors.  He said, and I quote, “I would fire 1,000 executives.” End of quote.  I’m not sure whether it made any difference to him which 1,000 executives, if he had anyone in particular in mind, or any thousand would do.  I just tell you this to start things off.

Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to get bumpy.

This talk will be divided into four sections.  In the first, I will tell you something about myself.  That’s long.  In the second I will tell you the mistakes General Motors has been making.  That’s longer.  In the third part, I will tell you why General Motors makes these mistakes.  That’s short.  In the fourth part, much shorter I am afraid, I will suggest what you can do about it.

I was born in Detroit, in the city, in 1931.  We lived on Willis between Second and Third, a few blocks south of Wayne University, which was a city university back then.

I went to the neighborhood schools, tough schools; it was a workers hillbilly neighborhood.  As a boy, my father and I would walk miles from our apartment to the Fisher theater to see the movies, and we walked to save the nickel bus fare.  We would always stop at the General Motors building to look at the cars, and the models.  They used to have a contest.  Young people would enter futuristic car designs, or make a copy of a Louis the 14th carriage.  I loved that GM display, and dreamed of the day we would have a car.

We moved uptown and I went to Central High School, where by the way, a classmate was Sander Levin, now a member of the House of Representatives and brother to Carl, your senator.  Then I came to Wayne University, worked as a copy boy on The Detroit News, as a writer for Motor News, the AAA magazine and on the college daily.  When I graduated after 3 1/2 years, in 1953, I enlisted in the U.S. Army.  The Korean War was on but I served in Europe, in intelligence, in what we called The Army Security Agency.

When I came home in 1956, I joined the Wall Street Journal in Chicago, and in 1958 transferred to Detroit.  I worked for the Journal in Detroit until 1967, when I became the New York Times bureau chief in Detroit and I held that position until 1973, when I transferred to New York for the Times, working the national news, then as a financial editor, then the national labor writer.  In 1979 I joined Forbes magazine as its Washington bureau chief, and in the 1980s transferred to New York where I worked in various jobs, including assistant managing editor.  I retired in 1996, but now write columns, six a month, one for Forbes Magazine monthly called Backseat Driver, plus a weekly column for Forbes.com, plus as monthly column for Ward’s Auto World, The Contrarian, and a monthly column for The Car Connection.Com.

I haven’t just written about cars.  I’ve covered politics, and am mentioned in the making of the President, 1968, by William White.  Along the way I’ve done some foreign reporting, chasing Communists in Central America during the Carter/Reagan years.  I’ve swung through Africa, Somalia, Nigeria, Angola, and South Africa.

Recently I was named one of the top 100 financial journalists of the century by TJFR, a financial journalists group.  I was ranked along with the likes of Ida Tarbell (the great muckraker who brought down the Standard Oil Trust), B.C. Forbes (founder of Forbes Magazine), Barney Kilgore, the creator of the modern Wall Street Journal.  I tell you this so you will understand that I just may know what I am talking about.

As to the auto business, I was there when Ed Cole created the Corvair and there when John Delorean created the GTO that Ronny and the Daytonas sang about.  I was there when Karl Hahn taught us to ‘think small’ about his beetle-shaped Volkswagen, and I was there when George Romney brought forth the compact Rambler and slew the dinosaurs in the driveway.  I was there when the Edsel was born, and when Bob McNamara of Viet Nam fame created the little Ford Falcon, the first car to really kick Chevy since the 1920s.  And better yet, I was there when Lee Iacocca introduced his Mustang.  I was there when Soji Hatori brought Toyota here.  Soji, by the way, dumped his Japanese wife and married an American blonde in a blimp over Los Angles.  I was there when Studebaker owned rights to distribute Mercedes cars in this country, and I was there in Utah when Sherwood Egbert sent his lovely Avantis racing across the Salt Flats in a last doomed effort to save Studebaker.

I drove Ralph Nader into Detroit from the airport when he came with his new book, Unsafe at Any Speed, and I knew Haagen Smit, who explained smog, and Bill Mitchell who knew how to make cars look long and low for General Motors.  I was there when Lee saved Chrysler with his K car and the minivan, and yes, I advised my readers to buy Chrysler stock when it was at 7 on its way down to 3.  I was there when Tom Gale and Bob Lutz did cab forward, and saved Chrysler again, and yes, I told my readers to buy Chrysler again at 10.

I do all this name dropping so you know that I know the difference between cars made of steel and cars made of clay, and more important, that I know the difference between men made of steel and men made of clay.

OK, end of Part 1.  Now I am going to talk about General Motors.

You won’t like what I have to say.

You are badly led, with an organization that just doesn’t work. I’m going to prove this to you, and my proof is an unparalleled number of errors, mistakes, and failures.

This isn’t a new theme with me.  In Wards Auto World of May 1998 I raised the question of GM strategy.  I noted that you had a strategy board that didn’t know anything about auto strategy

I wrote that your strategy board had decided that luxury sport utility vehicles had no place in the company’s own Cadillac division, thereby going about as far as anyone could to destroy Cadillac.  This isn’t hindsight. Mercedes, BMW and Lexus all understood what was happening at the same time that GM rejected a Cadillac SUV, and they created SUVs, and so did Lincoln.

Quoting from that column on Saturn: “The board is taking seven years to get Saturn a second car, (it really took ten years) thereby leaving its most warm and fuzzy division to wallow in a small-car depression.  Instead of investing in success, this board starved it.” end of quote.

You know, they took away the Saturn’s product engineers.  They are out to make Saturn into another Oldsmobile.  Look at the LS launch.  First, the idea of forcing Saturn to use a German platform designed for a metal body on a car with a plastic body is ludicrous.  It cost more and took longer to do than to get a completely new platform for Saturn.  Then the car design was completely undistinguished, and the actual launch was the worst I have ever seen in 40 years.  The result is that sales are one-third expectations in the first year and the factory lost a shift.  I figure that is as $500 million a year loss.

This is the board that has never updated and will soon kill the Camaro. That should take a good part of the excitement from Chevrolet.   GM executives don’t seem to understand that the art in the auto business is building desirable vehicles, not killing models and closing plants.

Your strategy board completely missed the trend to car-based all wheel drive vehicles, and is years behind the Lexus RX 300, the Honda CR-V and the like. Even Ford is in production of the Escape.  How many more years must we wait for such a GM vehicle?

Now let’s go beyond that 2 1/2 year old article:

Your management built an all-new pickup truck without four doors, when Dodge and Ford and Toyota all had four-door big pickups.  To this day no one at GM admits to have made that decision.  It must have been someone they promoted. How could they build an all-new vehicle with three doors when they knew, they knew, their competitors would have four?

How could they be a door short on an all-new vehicle?  Your company still, still, doesn’t have a four-door small pickup.  That is unfucking believable. Ranger creams them.  If Dodge Dakota had the capacity, it probably would outsell the Chevy S-10.  I asked one of your highest-ranking executives why no 4-door S-10.  He explained that since a new S-10 was coming a few years down the road, they didn’t want to spend the money.  Your people never, it seems, have head the word “competition.” Now about a month ago you did begin production of a Chevy S-10 Crew Cab.  That is a type of four door, but different from the usual design.  In fact, this is a vehicle you build in Brazil, so you could have produced it here earlier.  And it is priced $4,000 above the two door.

I’m sure they will sell some, but why are they years late in matching the competition.  There is only one answer.  Incompetence.

Just to repeat what I am doing now, I am listing dumb decisions by your management that proves they know nothing about the auto business. The EV-1.   I am all for experimentation, but to spend $250 to $400 million for a 2-seater with a 40-mile range, are we out of our minds?  That is the greatest car disaster ever, covered up by the press because it’s a green disaster.  The EV-1 makes the Edsel look like a bases loaded home run in the last of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series.

Once the then-chief executive of your company, Jack Smith, said to me, and I quote, “You don’t think we can do anything right.” I told him that I did think they did one thing right, they did a good job cutting manufacturing costs.  And guess what?  They’ve fired the man who did it, Don Hackworth.

And talking about strategy boards, did you know that the chief of design is not on the GM global strategy board, but your vice president of human resources is.  That’s right: the global strategy board, the head of design isn’t on it but the head of the employment office is.  Go figure.

Brand marketing.  I don’t think much of brand marketing theories.  To me they are just a way of avoiding the idea of building a better product.  I suppose that if your idea of a new model change is putting six more raisins in a box of cereal, then brand marketing might be important.  But even if I did believe, the idea that every single car model is a brand is incredibly dumb.  No one in the industry believes this, except at GM.  The idea that Chevy Impala is a separate brand, that Chevy Monte Carlo is a brand, that Cavalier is a brand, that Malibu is a brand is nutsy kookoo.  You can’t have 75 brands within GM.  It won’t work, but it has been the GM strategy.  And what’s the result of this strategy?  Falling market share every year this management has been in power.

Look at the numbers.  Your management has lost an average 3/4 of a percent point of market share very year, from 35% to down toward 28% this year.  My belief is that you are headed to 25% of the market.  I would also predict that before long someone high will “take the fall” for this loss, which I put directly on the top management and its theories.

Supplier relations: Your company has the poorest supplier relations in the industry, and a reputation of mistreating suppliers, of trying to beat down their prices unfairly.  If someone comes up with a great innovation, GM is the last company it will try to sell it to for these reasons.  I have had the CEO of major suppliers say this.  Yet this is how your management does business.

Another disaster was the strike of 1998, which cost GM, I believe, better than $2 billion in profit.  General Motors provoked that strike. Look, I covered the UAW in Detroit.  I knew Walter Reuther and Leonard Woodcock and Doug Fraser.  I knew the company negotiators like Malcolm Denise of Ford and Earl Bramlett of GM.  I was the labor writer of the New York Times.  GM deliberately provokeded the strike.  I’m not saying that was wrong.  It is OK to provoke a strike, and GM had some justification But when GM was 24 hours from winning, the company surrendered.  Apparently GM decided that winning would hurt the UAW’s feelings.  Why provoke a strike unless you intend to win?  Why surrender when victory is in your grasp.  At a cost of $2 billion.  The performance of your management was unbelievable here.

How about the dealer ordering system, which was installed by present management?  The company has been in business since 1907, and it sets up a system that keeps dealers from getting the cars they need.  This cost GM one-half of a percent of market share, which is 85,000 sales, or $2 billion in sales.  How could your management install an ordering system that didn’t work?  How?

Fit and Finish.  Look, the quality of your fit and finish is the worst in the industry, excluding Koreans.  Your executives know it, too, but what are they doing about it?  I’ll know they are doing something when an executive vice president is given the public responsibility of improving fit and finish, and his bonus is on the line.

The dealers.  You want to know something.  The only reason you are still selling 28% of the market is your dealers.  The biggest distribution system in the business.  And your management hates them.  They actually announced a plan to buy 15% of the GM dealers, to go into competition with their own dealers, and then when the dealers blew up, your chief executive said he didn’t know anything about it.  Well, GM is disorganized but I don’t believe that Roy Roberts invented and publicly announced a billion-dollar acquisition plan all by himself.

Sorry.

Design: What do you want me to say?  GM invented car design, Harley Earle, Bill Mitchell.  I knew some of these people.  Now, you have the Aztek.  For God’s sake, why couldn’t they hire somebody.  Ford did, Chrysler did, Mercedes and BMW did, they all do (not the Japanese-their designers really are Japanese).  Now GM did hire someone from the outside, a French woman from Renault.  Now I like French women, and I wish her well, I am sure she is talented.  But please explain to me who buys French Renaults besides the French…and a few Spaniards.  Who?  Nobody.  Why can’t GM find an American who understands the American culture, and who can create a PT Cruiser, or a Thunderbird?  Why do they hire a foreigner?

I ask you, if you didn’t work for GM, would you drive a GM car?

Let’s get specific: How about that pickup truck design.  You know, that’s where the money is, the T800 platform.  The pickup is the heart of it.  You used to be #1 in pickups, now you are behind Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram has scored big off Chevy.  So you designed a new truck, darn good truck, too, except for the rattles.   But when it came to design, they made it look like the old one.  You know why?  Because instead of relying on your designers to design a modern-looking truck, you took the designs to focus groups, and they picked the old look.  So your new truck looks dated when it comes out, and in a couple of years will really look dated.  And as noted earlier, they forgot to put four doors on it at first.  These are the reasons I believe your Silverado sales are less than expected, why you are rebating it.

Then we have the Pontiac Aztek.  I’m not going to dump on it, and I hope it catches on.  I hear it’s a dud, but you never can tell.  But have never, never seen such dislike of a vehicle design, never.

Look, even the future stuff, the show cars, they just don’t look right.  I know it and you know it.  Why hasn’t this management done something about it?

Oldsmobile: Look, Olds is dead.  Your management is saying that they did everything possible and its up to the dealers and the customers to save Olds.  Those are code words.  Figure five years and gone.  They did give Olds new product, but it was product without any design distinction, without any engineering firsts, a new engine that wasn’t better than the competition, and mediocre quality and inexperienced leadership.  Hell, they fired the experienced leadership.  Remember the Rock, John Rock.  The head of Olds today used to sell Alpo dog food.  You figure it out.  Five years and dead.  Why five years?  It’s a legal strategy.  Starve it to death so sales fall, so we can’t be sued.

Cadillac.  Let’s not go over 15 years of disaster.  Let’s just say that I’ve seen the new Catera, to be built in a new plant in Lansing.  But where’s the new motor.  The old German motor was one of the Catera problems, and they are putting that old engine in the new car, maybe with a horsepower boost. That’s not the way to save Cadillac.  The car needs a great engine and it doesn’t have one.  And I understand that rushing out the Escalade was to save the dealers, but long run it reinforced the idea that Cadi is a Chevy with thicker leather.  BMW builds an all new X-5.  Mercedes builds an all new ML 320.  Cadi gets a redone Tahoe.  If they could create new vehicles, and even new factories, why couldn’t GM?  Some management.

True story: One of the most important businesswomen in America decided to buy an SUV.  Her name is known to all of your directors.  She’s big.  She asked a friend of mine if he could get her some to test drive.  He said he could and would get her a Cadillac Escalade.  She said to him, and this is the quote: “Don’t insult me.”

The Escalade isn’t a bad vehicle.  It’s quite OK.  But the prestige of Cadillac is so low that a well-known person says that being offered a Cadillac to drive is an insult.

Which brings us to Powertrain.  Would someone tell me what Powertrain has been doing for 20 years?

You know, a while back GM was the greatest engine maker in the world, the greatest.  Then some jackass stuck Chevy engines in Oldsmobiles.  Instead of saying, we’re sorry, it will never happen again and firing the idiot, GM solved the problem by eliminating divisional engines and setting up one big engine operation, Powertrain.

In my lifetime, in my lifetime, GM Powertrain has never turned out a world class four-cylinder engine in North America.  Never.

The best Six, the 3800, is as old as Methuselah, so they are trying to sell an ancient engine to a generation that doesn’t want a two-year-old computer.  There’s a little four-cylinder engine in the $10,000 Toyota Echo that has more technology than any GM engine today.  Your first engine with variable valve breathing comes out next year.  Let’s hope they can build it. The Japanese and Europeans have been building them for years; that’s why they are good now.  We’ll see what happens to your new variable valve engines next year.

All you hear is Northstar Northstar Northstar.  BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda wouldn’t have Northstar in their cars.  No variable valve breathing.  What GM needs is a new small block V-8.  Where is it?  Don’t ask me.

In fact, you are buying a six-cylinder engine from Honda for Saturn.  Saturn was created to prove that Americans could build as good a product as the Japanese.  Now they are buying Honda engines for Saturn, which proves that this management not only can’t build a better engine, it’s given up trying. In Heaven you can hear Ed Cole and Boss Kett sobbing.  GM has to buy engines from a competitor

They don’t even have a five-speed automatic for their own cars which are front wheel drive.  They are getting one, when the competition is getting six speed automatics.  GM will get its five when the competition is getting a six speed.  Actually, GM did make five speed automatics for rear wheel drive cars, and sold them to your competitors.  Believe it or not, you helped your competitors whip you.

This management is so inept that its own wholly-owned subsidiary, German Opel, revolted.  Did you know that?  The board of directors of German Opel, appointed by GM, revolted.  They blamed Detroit for stripping Opel of resources for GM’s globalization, thereby wrecking Opel quality.  The American head of Opel, Dave Herman, agreed with the Germans, so GM in Detroit, in effect, fired him, ordered him transferred to Moscow.  The German board said no, you can’t fire Dave Herman unless we say so and fuck you guys in Detroit.  Unprecedented.  It took a half-year to straight this out, and they are still mad.

And while we’re on this, how about this “alliance” strategy?  GM spent billions buying 20% of Suzuki, half of Isuzu, 20% of Fiat, 20% of Subaru. Remember, I’m supposed to be a good financial reporter, voted one of the century’s best.

Well, this alliance strategy makes no sense at all to me.  Did you know GM has owned part of Isuzu since 1971, that’s 29 years?  What have they gotten from it?  They’ve been in Suzuki since 1981.  19 years.  What have they gotten from it?  In profits?  Nothing.  They get to sell the Geo Tracker. They don’t even get the good Tracker.  You get the old one.  Billions down the ratholes and they call it a strategy.  Well, it is, a losing strategy.

Here’s am aside:

This year’s General Motors annual report said “It’s no secret that, in recent times, General Motors has been thought of by some as the ‘product laggard’ in the industry.  We don’t think that description has ever been fair.  However, that image is going to change.”

Well, I’m the one they are talking about.  And they say it’s isn’t true but it’s going to change.  Why, with the same people leading the team?  They are doing the best they can.  It just isn’t good enough.

The other day I saw the new SUV the GMC Envoy.  That’s the new Jimmy, like the new Blazer will be called the Trailblazer.  That Envoy looked good, darn good.  But the version I saw had only two rows of seats, no third row option.  GM will build an extended wheelbase version for a third seat.  That extended seat version will be the same length of the GMC Yukon that has a third seat.  You’ve got to understand, the extended wheelbase Envoy and the Yukon, both the same length, will sit three feet apart in the showroom.

Why do that?  Why not build one Envoy, an inch or two longer if need be, with an optional third seat.  If it’s not comfortable, the salesman sells the Yukon.  You know, that is what Ford is doing.  The new Explorer will have a third seat option, with no $200 million spent for an extended wheelbase version.

The same thing will go for Chevy extended wheelbase Trailblazer and the Tahoe.  Ain’t there anyone in RenCen who knows how to play this game?

How about the advertising?  Remember the Cadillac Ducks?  All that money spent to introduce the Catera with stupid and silly ads.  How about the new Cadillac advertising theme?  ”The power of &.” I don’t know anyone that knows what it means.  And they never fire an ad agency.

I will say the Onstar ads with Batman are terrific.  Super.  I don’t understand how they got them.  I figure they’ll fire the guy who did them.

There’s so much.  It goes on and on.  They talk about a major effort to build a five-day car; you can have it built-to-order and delivered in five days.  What, you need a five-day Cavalier?  The major reasons for not having what the customer wants are corporate.  That is, they want V-8s and you don’t have enough V-8 capacity, so you give incentive money to sell sixes. They want silver paint jobs, but the company bought white paint and wants to use it up.  Sure, they should make it faster to get a car built-to-order, but that’s no big deal.

E-Business, China, your management puts its hopes in all these fantasies. Meanwhile, Toyota is going to outsell your cars in California.  Last year, you registered 182,000 cars in California.  Toyota registered 161,000.  You were just 21,000 ahead.  When will they pass you?  And they are catching up in trucks, too.  Your management doesn’t know that beating Toyota in California is more important than dreaming about China.

And there’s no modern GM convertible, either.  Chrysler sells 60,000 Sebrings.  Ford Sells 40,000 Mustangs.  Good business.  But it’s more than that.  The convertible is the spirit of a company.  That’s why Toyota builds them.  You have the ancient and soon to die Camaro and the two-seat ‘Vette.

Do we have to go on?

Everybody makes mistakes.  But your management makes so many of them. The proof of their incompetence is in the number of mistakes.  There is absolutely no reason to think that this will change.  The same people who made the mistakes are still in charge, and they haven’t admit

End of Part 2.

Part 3, a much shorter segment.  Why these things happen.

Listen carefully: You have a management that doesn’t know much about the American car business.  It isn’t that they are bad people or dumb people.  I assume they are smart.  They just don’t know much about the American car business.  Look at their resumes.  The chairman and former CEO was the former treasurer who made his bones negotiating the joint-venture deal for the Fremont plant with Toyota.  As a reward was made boss of GM Canada and then GM Europe, and he did a good job, a good job.  But he had no American car experience.  And in Europe, he had top people around him; they knew the business.  That wasn’t true here.

Your new CEO likewise was a financial official, who did a good job in Brazil and a good job in Europe, but had little American car experience, until he was made president of North American operations.  His on-the-job training was running North American Auto Operations.  He lost market share very year and was promoted to CEO.  Most of the disasters that I’ve described, and the fall in market share, came on his watch.  Yes, you did make profit here.  It would be amazing if you couldn’t make a profit in a 17 million-car year. What happens when it goes to 13.5 million and you have 25% share?

Look, I don’t have anything against financial people.  One of the best officers I knew, Bill Hoglund, the man who turned around Pontiac, you know, ‘We Build Excitement,’ was a financial man.  But he had cars in his heart, and that’s what counts, what’s in your heart, not what you studied in graduate school.

Your president today of North American operations was selling eye wash five years ago.  Actually I like Ron Zarrella.  He is terrifically smart, and a quick study.  But he doesn’t have any experience, the knowledge you get from seeing how things really work.  If he had great backup, that might be OK.  But the backup is awful.  They don’t know the auto business, either. Ron is like a quarterback just out of college, playing for the NFL in his first year, and with no protection.  He’s going to get sacked an awful lot.

It’s one thing not to know the business.  But worse, your management doesn’t like people who do know something about the American car business. Look at the top-flight people who have gone.  JT Battenberg, one of the best, gone from GM.  Don Hackworth, who once headed Buick and then manufacturing, going.  Lou Hughes, gone.  Mike Losh, the CFO who once headed Pontiac and Olds, gone.  John Rock, who saved GMC, bounced.  Ed Mertz of Buick, gone.  My impression has been that they actually consider knowledge of the business as some kind of disadvantage.

But worse is the management system they have set up.  You don’t have a working system.

Gentlemen, and ladies, again, I am supposed to know something about managements.

Let me tell you a story.  Years ago, in the 1950s, Pontiac was going down, and GM sent over Bunkie Knudsen to take over.  He took over 60 days before Job 1.  He went down to the styling shop to see what he had coming in 60 days.

Pontiac was an old man’s car then.  It’s styling symbols were two wide chrome stripes running down the hood, we called them suspenders, and the Pontiac Indian head on the hood.

It was only 60 days before Job 1, and Bunkie couldn’t do much, so he said take off the suspenders and the Indian head.

Well, one day I asked the vice president of Buick, you remember, Ed Mertz, if he could walk in 60 days before Job 1 and strip chrome off his car.  That was in the day of The 4 Phase System of new car development.  You remember the 4 Phase system; it started at Phase Zero and ended at Phase 3. I want you to know I never thought much of a company with a 4 Phase System that starts at Zero and goes to 3.  Anyway, I told Mertz the Knudsen story and asked if he could go into design 60 days before Job 1 and strip off chrome.

He said, “Sixty days before job 1?  Hell, that’s Phase 5.”

Gentlemen, I have not found one man in GM who could by himself order a piece of chrome stripped off a car.  Your management has created a system without power or responsibility, or with power and responsibility so diffused that it takes forever to get anything at all done.  Even the VLE have to hold meetings to strip off a piece of chrome.

You could say your CEO has power, but he says he doesn’t know anything about design or engineering or marketing so why would he do anything.

Look, the division chiefs are nothing anymore.  They aren’t vice presidents; they have no power over quality even.  A division like Cadillac has about 50 people on the payroll.  They probably will be eliminated in time and the division chief, too.

The brand-marketing boss is supposed to have power, but as far as I can he or she has power over the advertising.  The VLE is supposed to be the boss, but they aren’t vice presidents, and they report to manufacturing and manufacturing never wants to change anything.

As far as I could tell, the most powerful car guy was Don Hackworth, but he’s gotten his head chopped off.

And there seems to be no penalty for failure.  Has anyone been fired for that Saturn disaster?  I figure the worst launch on top of the worst platform decision, which was, by the way, forced not by Saturn people but by top management of GM.  Have they shaken up design for those boring products? Have they changed the brand management for the market share loss?  Did they ever fire anybody for lousy advertising?  There is no penalty for failure.

How can anyone who knows something about the American car business, about cars, get to the top, or even the #2 position, of GM.  I don’t see the pathway up.  Engineers don’t count for anything anymore in this company as far as I can tell.  You know, even Fred Donner, the ultimate financial man at GM, who set up the last management system about 40 years ago, felt that while there should be a financial man on top, the #2 should know something about cars.  Not today.

I recall John Rock, then a vice president of Oldsmobile, said to me, “This system won’t work, but it will take them 10 years to find out.”

Your board of directors.  I believe there is only one person on the entire board who likes cars, and it’s not Jack Smith, the chairman, either

The stock price: it is as high as it is because of Hughes, bought by Roger Smith.  Without Hughes I figure GM could be selling at 35.  And you can thank Carl Icahn, the old raider for pushing it up 12 points by announcing a raid.  Now he’s gone.  Where will it go?

Enough, end of Part 3

Part 4.  What can you do about it?

Well I hope someone made a tape of this speech.  If not, I can give you a copy of my text.  Each one of you should drop a note to each member of the board.

You could do it in a round robin, if you wanted.  That is, everyone signs the same note, in a circle.  That’s a round robin.  No one stands out. Tell them you don’t know if I’m right or wrong but you’re worried about GM.

Urge them to set up a committee of outsiders, men who know the business, to study GM and report back with a plan of action in 60 days.  Make suggestions about who should be on this committee.

How about Bill Hoglund, ex GM executive vice president.  How about Roger Penske, how about Lee Iacocca, or Bill Mitchell or Bob Eaton or Bob Lutz or JT Battenberg or Maryanne Keller.

The board must order that all records and minutes be made available immediately to the committee.  They must order that all officers make cooperation with the committee their first, their first priority.  That’s anyone obstructing, delaying or acting in any way uncooperatively shall be suspended by the committee awaiting board action.  Who could they hire if they went that way?  Believe me, there are people out there who could lead General Motors back to Glory.  And throw another shrimp on the barbie. That’s a hint about one of them.

The committee should have the right to interview people outside of GM for positions within the company.  The committee members must be paid terribly well for their work, too.  That’s because if they do it for free no one will respect the report.  They only respect what they overpay for. You can call this “The Committee of Public Safety.” What else can you do?  Go to church and pray.  Your company is going down to 25% of the market.  That’s not terrible.  You can make money at 25%, Ford does.  But I don’t see leaders coming up the pipeline.  All I see is more stretch goals.

When you write to your board members, tell them that’s you don’t understand how a company that depends on products, has no upward mobility for product people.  None of the top executives are product people. Write slogans on walls, too.  Victory or Death, Beat Ford, V, Sic Semper Tyrannis.

That’s it.

My last words:
Never Give Up,
Never Surrender,
And don’t let them take you alive.

Any comments or questions?

At his good-will tour to Detroit, President Obama came bearing gifts for Ford. Ford will receive $250m in government financing that will help export more than 200,000 vehicles, the White House announced, and the DetN printed it.

The money doesn’t come from the Whitehouse. It comes as a loan guarantee by the Export-Import Bank of the United States. It will finance $3.1b of export sales for more than 200,000 vehicles to buyers in Canada and Mexico.

Why?

Says the DetN: “The bank makes loans to help boost exports, in part to level the playing field when other countries help industries with exports.”

GM’s CEO Ed Whitacre has told the remaining employees that his purges of senior management are complete. “I want to reassure you that the major leadership changes are behind us,” Whitacre wrote in a March 31 letter obtained by Bloomberg. “The team we have in place today is the team that will take us forward.”

Whitacre, 68, said he wrote the letter to quell employees’ anxiety. Apparently, they wondered who will be next. Never good for morale. “People who have been there a long time, even if they are doing a good job, they worry about getting the phone call because of all the turmoil,” said Joe Phillippi, president of consultant AutoTrends in Short Hills, New Jersey. “Getting out there and saying the team is in place is a good idea.”

“We need to be able to make decisions faster.” Thus spake GM CEO Fritz Henderson to Automotive News [sub] at the National Business Summit yesterday. In what can only be termed a blinding flash of the almost obvious, he continued, “As part of the General Motors moving forward, you don’t normally think of us as speedy or fast, and that’s what we should be. But when you’re fast you do make mistakes. My view is if you’re slow, you make more mistakes. You just don’t notice it.” Huh? Anyway, what about organizational changes? What’s he waiting for?

That will be a discussion with you on a different day. [Ed: Not so fast! Not so fast!] But there are a number of things we need to do to run the business differently.

And what might those be?

It’s not just about getting our cost structure right and getting our capital structure right. It’s also making sure the decision-making process we use is working better. That’s our responsibility.

Well, it’s good to hear you’re finally taking responsibility for something. Does that mean the PTFOA will back off and let you take care of business?

They’re going to be actively involved through the bankruptcy process.

For how long?

We said 60 to 90 days, but it could be outside that. I’m not making another prognostication at this point.

And then what? The government will own 60 percent of the company. Do you really expect them to go away and let you run things?

Assuming that the judge approves the bankruptcy process and the 363 process [dividing GM's good and bad assets] and we were to exit, the board would be in place and I expect we’d be operating on that basis then.

Gotcha.

While GM finishes its 40-year rush to judgement, heading for its June 1 date with a bankruptcy judge, there are still such things as GM customers. You know; millions of people who own GM products. And these people are—shock!—still buying cars and getting their cars serviced. And there, on the sharp end, dealers, salesmen, service managers and technicians are all attempting to come to grips with the competitive, financial and psychological dangers implicit in a GM C11. To calm these troubled souls, GM’s North America Vice President of Vehicle Sales and Service has been Bob Marleying these forward troops, telling them that every little thing’s gonna be alright. To that end, last month, Mark LaNeve announced the launch of a “weekly conversation” with GM dealers: “reinventing GM.” There was one e-mail communication on April 3.

Although it’s not exactly the riddle of the Sphinx (answer: man), many of our Best and Brightest have wondered why GM can’t make a decent car interior. Even before GM Car Czar Bob Lutz assumed the throne (since abdicated), the American automaker has admitted that they need to step up their game within its vehicles. And yet, in the main, the fit and finish of GM interiors still doesn’t make the grade. Obviously, there’s a whole host of contributing factors—from supplier contracts to union work rules. A GM insider recently contacted TTAC to provide an important piece of that particular puzzle. Agent X reveals one of the main reasons GM’s interiors failed to match the competition: the executives didn’t know there was a problem. Still don’t. Here’s why . . .

As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.

Well, did the DPG at least send a list of changes to the design and production teams? “The tweaks were never reported to anyone,” he says. “That would’ve been a sure way to kill your career . . . We’d see the cars come back to us after production with the exact same problems.”

According to Agent X, GM’s testing regimen is getting worse, not better. GM has sold-off the DPG (soon to be a major resort). The replacement facility in Michoacán, Mexico, has proven problematic—weather and local topography are hampering testing procedures—and the new Yuma, Arizona, facility is not yet up and running.

And anyway, GM’s reduced its DPG testing by over seventy percent. “The buzz inside GM is now ‘from road to lab to math.’” In other words, laboratory tests are replacing road tests, until computer simulation can replace lab tests.

Agent X and I agreed that GM’s product development system was and is fundamentally flawed. Equally important, we also shared the belief that there’s tremendous talent locked-up inside the CYA hell that is GM’s corporate culture. “Look at the ZR1,” he said. “It shows GM can make great, world-beating cars.”

“But what about the Corvette’s interior,” I asked. His silence spoke volumes.

GM’s Steve Harris is dancing all over the bankruptcy issue at GM’s Fastlane blog. Yesterday Haris was sounding resigned if still-delusional. “So, by now you’ve seen the news reports,” he wrote. “You know that auditors have said that there is substantial doubt about GM’s ability to survive as a ‘going concern’ through the end of the year. It’s certainly led to some scary headlines – some more accurate than others, of course.” But all scary. Yeah, believe it or not, we kind of saw it coming.

“First of all, we’d just remind everyone that an auditor’s job involves objectively determining whether there is substantial doubt about a company’s ability to survive the year.”

To be fair other people at GM are probably supposed to help “objectively determine the company’s ability to survive the year,” but the auditors are the only ones who can be prosecuted if they don’t.

“Given our recurring losses, the weakness of the economy and the auto industry in particular and the fact that we have announced that we will need additional support this year, we agree that our ability to continue as a going concern is a matter of substantial doubt that depends on a number of factors—and we don’t control all of them. We acknowledge the challenges and risks that face us today, but we’re still going forward with our plan, we’re still making the best cars we’ve ever built, and we’re still rebuilding our company for long term viability.”

Oh, right. Dozed off for a second there. Sorry.

“I know, some will say that this sounds like corporate-speak. But what does anyone expect – that we’ll pick up our marbles, say “They’re right,” and go home? Sorry… we’re planning on being around. We understand all too well the challenges we face at this time and in this truly difficult economy. But we’re not giving up, we’re not giving in, and we sure aren’t planning on going away.”

You mean cards, not marbles. When you’re threatening the US government with $100 billion in pension liabilities, you always stay in the hand. Even if your “Vice President, Global Communications” admits that his blog post sounds like “corporate speak.” And as of today, Harris has his poker face back. Go underdogs!

“Sometimes there’s coverage in the media that doesn’t represent the full story of what’s happening at GM. I thought I’d take the opportunity to use FastLane to fill you in on a recent media misstep.”

Please do not read my post from yesterday.

“Despite the story in today’s Wall Street Journal, I am here to tell you that General Motors has not changed our position on bankruptcy. Since this is a major issue, much in the news today, we issued a statement in response to the story – and while I hate to just repost things verbatim, the press statement is dead-on, so I’ll repeat it here:”

You get the idea. And no apologies for “corporate speak” this time either. Meanwhile, GM’s stock has fallen below $1.50.

[Editor's Note: This is the third part of a four-part series by Dr. Rob Kleinbaum. Parts one and two are still available.]

What is fascinating about GM, and offers some hope, is that it really has two cultures. The one described above is an accurate depiction of the culture in North America and Western Europe but there is another in the rest of the world that is very different. The culture of GM’s operations in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, is much more progressive and it is in these areas that GM is doing very well. On almost all of the measures listed above, they would come out on the progressive side. Working for GM in Asia Pacific, Latin America or the Middle East, you would think you were in a completely different company. People are very forward looking, they are capable of making the tough decisions, they are business focused, debate is tolerated but discipline is enforced, relations with their labor force and dealers are usually positive, and authority is genuinely dispersed to the smaller business units within each of the regions.

Numerous people have commented on the difference in economic health and attributed it to the absence of the UAW, retiree’s health care burden and government regulations such as CAFE. While these are important, it is misleading to attribute the differences to these factors. Since many of these issues are the result of the deliberate policy choices of GM, they are more symptoms of the underlying malaise than the cause; plus the healthy regions all have tremendous challenges of their own that are not present in North America or Western Europe, where the static culture is really confined.

Many of the people running GM have had extensive international experience. There is a common practice of rotating executives on the CEO track to international postings; the classic path is for a high potential finance executive from a traditional background is to be made head of GM Brazil; a business unit whose culture is quite progressive and has been consistently profitable over many years.  Rather peculiarly, there is very little rotation of executives who have “grown up” in overseas operations into the key spots in North America. With a couple of exceptions, none of the top team has spent the majority of their careers in these regions that have been the most successful.

Furthermore, Asia Pacific and Latin America/Africa/Middle East are headed up by people with quite different backgrounds; one is British, the other is a female Canadian lawyer; neither have spent the majority of their careers in Detroit. The people operating the lower level business units in these healthy regions tend to be either foreign born or Americans who are considered “different” and who have quite deliberately chosen to stay as far from Detroit as possible, often explicitly to avoid a culture they find stultifying and dismaying.

Despite the progressive nature of the culture overseas and its consistent success, there seems little propensity to bring these people back into North America or Western Europe; somehow they are simply never seen as “developed” enough. When one or two promising individuals are brought back, they are often overwhelmed by the dominant culture in Detroit and either head back overseas quickly, leave the company, or fade into obscurity.

Twenty years ago, Elmer Johnson, a successful outside lawyer recruited into GM’s top ranks and a candidate for CEO, wrote a memo to the senior leadership, recently posted in Barron’s⁴, which was heartbreakingly prophetic. Its central theme was that GM’s culture was preventing it from executing its strategy and unless there was a concerted effort to change its culture, there would be little chance of meaningful change. He was ignored and shortly afterwards left the company.

His prophecy that GM would fail in its bid to become a company that built the world’s best cars and trucks in a way that provided superior shareholder value has, regrettably, proven disastrously true. The recommendations he made; major changes in people at the top, the committee structures, the organizational structure, and decision making process, are still sound but now would not go nearly far enough.

This raises the question of what can be done. The first and most obvious is to change a significant number of people at the very top, replacing them either with outsiders or with GM executives from overseas operations who have not grown up in the traditional culture. This should go several levels down but also include substantial changes in the Board of Directors, as they are key enablers and drivers of the corporate culture. The Board has not put any pressure on management to change its culture or drive accountability; on the contrary they have consistently re-stated their support of the management team. There are few if any real change agents on GM’s Board. Changing large numbers of people at the top is a necessary but not sufficient condition, as the static culture is reinforced by so many other attributes.

[End of Part Three. To be continued . . . .]

[Editor's Note: This is the second of a four-part series by Dr. Rob Kleinbaum. Read the first part here.]

The scholars Lawrence Harrison, Samuel Huntington and their colleagues have addressed the fundamental question of whether culture “matters” in how societies develop and make a compelling case that it matters a great deal.  They have also outlined the specific traits that lead a society to progress or prevent it from doing so and their work provides a rigorous way to think about culture that is based on substantial evidence. These traits seem applicable to a private enterprise, especially one that is larger and older than many countries.

Progressive cultures emphasize the future; static cultures emphasize the present or past. GM, unfortunately, lives in its past glory, as there were always better times in days gone by. Like the UK before Thatcherism, there is a deep sense that their value is their heritage, not what they are going to do tomorrow. While there have been pockets that have looked forward, and serious investments in fuel cells, there is little belief that the future is theirs to make.

Work is central to the good life in progressive cultures but a burden in static cultures. This is a mixed story for GM as there is generally a very strong work ethic but it is confined to the elites more than the rank and file, whether union or company. For the white- and blue-collar workers, there is much more emphasis on leisure and “the good life” than the value of hard work. So you will find certain groups working 70 hour weeks routinely but others who will get angry if you even suggest working over a weekend or a vacation. And somewhat perversely, the groups that do work very long hours are driven to it by a few leaders who think that it is a constant requirement with the consequence that work becomes inefficient and fills the required time rather than being driven by sensible needs to do whatever it takes to win.

Frugality and investment are valued in progressive societies but seen as a threat in static cultures. GM seems to have redefined the notion of investment as cost cutting. For some reason, time after time, the company believes it can reduce its capital investment in products whenever times get bad without having to pay for it in consequences of compromised characteristics and lower share and price. The company also seems willing to save $1 in capital even if it costs $100 in incentives. For a company run by finance people, they seem to have lost all notion of what investment means, in product or people. Further, when they have made investments that were different and quite successful, such as NUMMI, Saturn, and then later OnStar and Hummer, they were made reluctantly and never really embraced by the organization, but seen as threats or outsiders. GMDAT, its Korean joint venture, has been a tremendous and unanticipated success, but is viewed with condescension and even deeply resented by many.

Education is critically important to progressive cultures, but only marginally important in static ones, except to elites. GM is squarely in the static camp. It talks about all the training it does, but in fact it is almost all peripheral; GM University, which was launched with soaring rhetoric, is of little to no importance, unlike Crottonville for GE.  Sure, the managers all have MBA’s and the standard path is still an undergraduate engineering degree from GMI and a Harvard MBA, but there is little emphasis placed on ongoing education and most of the programs that were in existence were among the first casualties of “structural cost reductions.”

In progressive societies, merit is central to advancement but in static ones it is family and connections. On this point, GM probably gets mixed to negative reviews. The sense is that one must be part of the club to advance, which usually means the right degree from the right school, the right path, and knowing the top guys, who are your mentors. Twenty years ago, GM would have been completely in the static dimension on this attribute, but there has been substantial progress in reaching out to groups that had been excluded in the past and advancing them on their merits. Unfortunately, this has been much truer for GM’s operations outside of North America and Western Europe than for these two core regions. In North America, the tradition is to pick high IQ people with the right background at an early age and then to rotate them through a series of “developmental” assignments. The consequence is that the people who rise to the very top are very smart with broad experience, but they are almost never people who have truly accomplished anything; who have built something from scratch or grown a business from small to large or turned around a losing operation into a profitable one.

In progressive cultures, people identify with groups well beyond the family and into society at large. GM falls directly into the static side. Despite substantial effort to create “one company”, GM is still surprisingly full of provincialism, based on both function and geography. Very few GM employees see themselves as truly belonging to the global enterprise; almost all identify themselves with their function and then the local business unit; viewing others as ignorant meddlers and sometimes outright adversaries. While many companies have embraced the notion of the “extended enterprise” and successfully manage complex alliance relationships, GM’s investments in major alliances; Fuji, Suzuki, Isuzu, and Fiat; were all great disappointments and had little if any return.

Of all GM’s cultural problems, this might be the most crippling as it perpetuates an inward focus that is largely responsible for its hostile relations with its dealers and suppliers and, most troubling, with consumers. As a consequence of its insularity, the company has repeatedly displayed behavior that shows it to be tone deaf to society at large and much of the external world has written off the company.

Ethical codes are more important in progressive cultures. Here GM gets high marks. There have been few corruption scandals, sexual harassment is not permitted, there is strict adherence to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the company will not let itself be associated with “shady” characters or businesses.  While any company of its size and scope will have incidents, the ethical codes at GM are high and enforced.

Authority tends to be horizontal and decentralized in progressive cultures and centralized and vertical in static cultures. Authority at GM is centralized and probably becoming more so as the company “globalizes” by creating strong, centrally controlled global functions which further weakens regional autonomy. While there are regional and functional strategy boards that have the appearance of dispersing authority, in fact they are all controlled by the same few people. One of the perverse outcomes of globalizing functions is that authority is becoming “horizontal” and strongly centralized, as global functions that are all run from Detroit become the main lines of authority and undercut the business units.

Progressive cultures are secular, with limited influence of religious culture and a high degree of tolerance of heterodoxy and dissent. GM scores fairly low on this attribute. There is little tolerance of strong dissent from the prevailing opinion, although there is substantial subversion and passive-aggressive resistance.  In discussions about setting direction, much more attention is given to wondering what the senior leadership will think than to figuring out the right path and trying to make it happen. The very senior people are often spoken of in tones of reverence and are seldom debated in any meaningful way.

Altogether, this is a fairly depressing picture. GM’s has been explicit about its cultural priorities; “One Company, Stretch, Sense of Urgency, and Product and Customer Focus”; but there has been little attention to making these real beyond re-iterating them at quarterly meetings.

[End of Part Two. To be continued . . . .]

]]> http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2009/02/guest-editorial-retooling-gms-culture-part-two/feed/ 15 http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008/12/inside-gm-go-on-take-the-money-and-run/ http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008/12/inside-gm-go-on-take-the-money-and-run/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:29:54 +0000 Robert Farago http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?p=187691 Another email from a GM insider: “Meet Rick, unassuming book worm with a penchant of fixing all things mechanical. Rick was a 12 year veteran of GM, spending 7 years as a journeyman Machine repairman. Due to a constantly shrinking work force, Rick soon had to relocate. Luckily, Rick’s first transfer kept him in his skilled trade and fortunately keep another well rounded expert in mechanical issues with the Corporation. Rick was content with the move but according to him ‘I wouldn’t wish that shit on anyone.’ Little did Rick know that the plant he just re-located to was soon announced that within 8 months it would cease production. Left with the option of hoping like hell another plant needed manpower or immerse himself in the job market, OL’ Rick again rented a U-Haul. It was in October 2003 that I had meet Rick. It still leaves me missing his daily ‘Hey dude, if its done this way, shit would be better’ remarks.

Rick backed up said statements through the bureaucratic hell we inside the Beast refer to as The SUGGESTION PLAN network. Its a spin on what the foreign transplant facilities had been doing for years. Its really a great way to filter ideas on manufacturing cost savings and throughput, quality and all the other things that brings together a sense in ownership among the workforce. Only problem with this idea is the amount of crap that clogs the filter.

Case in point: one suggestion to repaint aisle way lines with corresponding dates rewarded the suggestor a $650 advancement on his check.

Rick’s suggestion relied more on his knack for watching the habits of mechanisms around him. Our own little Goodwill Hunting of the Industrial world placed a suggestion that saved scrap cost an amazing $112,000 in a calendar year. Rick’s reward? An umbrella and an entry into the plants Holiday raffle.

So what you say? He should have done this because he works for GM,right! He already draws a good living and should support the cause. Problem is, Rick agreed. It’s job security. It’s a reduction in waste and another fine effort in reduction of expenditures.

The Suggestions that employees enter have to be approved by management. Once approved the suggestion then enters the realm of applicability. This is a dangerous realm. Chock full of wicked nay-sayers. Self righteous middle and upper management that wallow in laziness. To implement is to do, to do is to work and surely they have to much on their platter to investigate a suggestion.

Rick’s suggestion would change tooling on many of the robots in his area, robots that moved parts of the sub-assembly from station to station. Occasional ”mis-grips” caused some components to slip and fall to the floor. After a cleaning of the area, any part that was malformed from the ”mis-grip” was shit-canned.

Rick attended team meetings and explained his suggestion to no avail. He stopped the plant manager, again to no avail. Rick went as far as to draft the sequence in which the tooling could be placed and explained that to reconfigure the tooling could take place in under 3 hours. One wall after another was what Rick ran into. Not to be discouraged, Rick continued to enter suggestions, sometimes he would go into other departments of the plant to seek out inefficiencies. Then one day his reply came back: implementation on tooling change cannot be accepted.

Rick retreated to his readings of spacial relations, particularly anything Hawkin. He was fond of saying that the book “A brief history of Time” was the idiot’s guide to feeling like an idiot. Always sticking to the unassuming role, Rick would confide in me how much he enjoyed making cars and doing it with GM. We could build an untouchable car if we wanted to. WE can design better than the japs. WE can do this and that.

It was then that I realized Rick was constantly thinking about the manufacturing of vehicles. All the while time was running out on Rick’s suggestion. Time limits are a bitch you know.

Over a year had passed and Rick’s suggestion was null and void. During a plant tour with executives from Corporate, a business unit superintendent SUGGESTED tooling changes would be implemented to reduce (get this shit) INCIDENTAL PART MALFORMITIES.

The evil empire won again.

When the presentation took place on this item the question was asked by one of the head honcho’s “Who came up with this idea?” Myself, replied the Super, along with help from our plants Millwright supervisor. I attended this meeting and spoke up on the behalf of Rick.This suggestion was turned in a year ago and credit should go to the proper employee. No such luck.

Returning to the area I went straight to Rick and explained what had taken place. He shrugged his shoulders and said “they can have it.” He had just signed the special attrition package. 12 years of service, 3 plants, numerous damn good ideas and the never ending “Rick Quest”of finding a better way to do things. $91,000 after taxes to leave it all behind.

The day he left we bid each other fare well and the promise to keep in contact. Before he left Rick could not find the Superintendent that cut him out. So he left his umbrella and a note simply saying “good luck.”

Rick is now employed at a foreign owned exhaust parts maker plant that services both GM and Honda. As a supervisor himself now, he has commented on the freedom of making changes regarding reducing anything redundant or wasteful. Sometimes these ideas work sometimes they dont.

But its the idea that these ideas are at least investigated that is the most reassuring.

The last conversation that Rick and I had regarded the Bridge loans, bail outs, whichever you like to call them.Though were separated by companies, our economic fate is intertwined. He’s remarked that his company cannot survive with the volume of only supplying Honda. It reminds me of what Rick said to me before he left GM. “Go on take the money and RUN.”

About 1982, I was talking to a GM rep. He said they expected a 30 percent major failure rate in that model year. I said, “You mean, if I have 1000 cars, 300 will need an engine or transmission?” He said yes, and I believed him. They knew they had huge quality problems, but viewed them as a cost of doing business.

There were terrible rust problems, worse on pickup trucks. Try and find an 83 on the road. Good luck. We had four cylinders (2.5) engine failure at lifter gallery: head gasket failures. 231 V6: timing chain failure. And I will never forget the GM V8 and V6 diesel engines– and not in a good way. The V8 required an overhaul about every 18 to 24 months.

Big money rigs would stick together. The V6 had more head problems than anything. Did you know if a shop rag is left on top of the piston of a V6 diesel and the engine fired up it looks like it is snowing inside the shop? True story.

Let’s not forget the GM metric thm 200; this underpowered transmission “powered” the Grand National. On the positive side, we had the bulletproof thm 400 (3sp) auto. Great trans! The thm 350 was also very reliable.

I did love the Buick Grand National and the GMC Typhoon. I’m not going to say they were reliable, but wow! Were they fassssssssssst.

Then came the mid-80′s. Talk about losing your way! We had transmissions that would not shift; when you take them apart, you couldn’t find any viable failure. The reps told of being in restaurants wearing the GM lapel pin and asked if they worked for General Motors. They’d respond that they worked for General Mills.

This was the time of the [Pontiac] Fiero. I considered it a modern-day Corvair; it leaked everywhere and would catch fire and GM did not know why.

The mid-80′s brought in electronic repair orders and the storing of repair histories. Most of the time, you still [to this day] had to keep a paper file on hand.

The 80′s also brought the famous “customer satisfaction index,” on which we are all rated and live and die by. They’ve revised it from time to time, but they always ask the wrong questions or make it too long or too confusing. And GM sends them all back to the dealer. I’m not sure if all they do with them is tabulate the score; I don’t think anyone at GM reads them. They want the dealer to handle everything.

I’ve worked in dealers with a poor score and ones with a very high score. It’s very hard to satisfy a customer that was stuffed into the car and can’t afford it or we can’t fix it… something that happened a lot during the 80′s. Not so much any more do we hear “the car is commercially acceptable” or “GM is aware of the problem and engineering is working on a fix”

The came the 90′s, and paint would blow off of your GM carwhile driving down the road. GMC had trucks that ran on natural gas; we could not fix them. Who can forget the 700r4 transmission? They lost the sun shell and then wouldn’t move. No reverse. Nothing.

These days, we have some very good and reliable vehicles. We still fix cars, but we don’t have the major failures that we had in the past. I feel that GM has a future– if we can get past this problem they are facing. How to do it? I don’t know.

And through all these years, one thing has remained constant: we still work on leaks, squeaks and rattles. These three complaints have remained consistent.

I’ve always worked for GM dealers. I’ve never owned any other vehicles but GM. I’ve  driven many types of other cars and see things on them that show up on GM cars about 5 years later. GM is always a day late and a dollar short.

This business has been good to me. I am not rich but have gotten by.

Do I think they should be bailed out? I’ve pondered this for weeks. My job depends on GM being viable. Part of me says help them out. But part of me says the marketplace must find it’s own level. I still don’t know. I do know no one from Congress or GM has asked me.”

I spent my time between my Holden stints at Toyota. I learned a lot, and although I don’t get excited about there product they give everything 100% which gives them an excellent result. They also have what they call a pillar of there mission – Respect for people. GM however is as described by some of your recent articles. Its a mess! I have only ever tried to do what’s best, offering alternative ways of doing things, proposing a different mindset of doing it right once. This has lead now to nothing short of intimidation and harassment by my management.

Pushed into a dead end job, verballed continuously by my bully manager. So I decided to ask for a Voluntary Separation. REJECTED!!! Why, if I want to I go empty handed is the response! Such a shame that something Iconic and something to be proud of has turned into something shameful and embarrassing. The people within my organisation are begging we are sold off, but nobody will speak up as they know they will be harassed and would be fired or worse put into a job you will never get out of and can;t leave due to the rising unemployment rates. I cannot see how GM will survive, it can’t even deliver a employee Christmas party let alone products people actually want to buy. Unfortunately all GM has done to Holden is engineer the Holden out of it.

During my whole time there I remember a constant pressure to reduce costs–benefits cuts, services cuts, fired contract help. I remember the FUD really getting strong in early 2006, when layoff rumors were running rampant. After the bloodletting and reorg, it died down some, although everyone was working 2-3 times as hard and all the managers were working OT and 7-day weeks.

The people who were most pleasant to work with (and most productive) were the 3D contract designers–one of them ran the coffee station and raised money for Iraqi troops and organized potlucks and stuff. But my area never did anything fun like that because we had only 1 admin and she was overwhelmed taking care of several executive directors–no Christmas potluck or anything.

I was in XXXX during my last year, which had a healthier culture than XXXX. Not as much FUD there, although there definitely was some present. When I left earlier this year, my director announced that I would not be replaced. They wanted to distribute my work amongst the other engineers, but they protested enough for my manager to declare that the efforts for my programs would be put on hold. I’m guessing that the FUD ramped up from that point on.

GM screwed up by being the grasshopper instead of the ants in the summer, and now it’s winter. I don’t want my new company to make that mistake, so I’m going to push for cost-cutting innovations.

I am rooting for the bailout loans to fail at this point, at least for GM. It needs to go C11 and reinvent itself. It will suck, but it’s going to suck anyway, and with C11 at least GM has a chance or surviving as GM.