During the Civil War, General George McClellan headed the largest army in the North. McClellan was an astounding capable soldier– except for the part about fighting and winning a war. He was also insubordinate, rude and a potential political rival for President Lincoln. The president’s Cabinet recommended McClellan’s dismissal. “Who should replace him?” Lincoln asked. “Anybody!” they replied. “I can’t give the job to ‘anybody,’” Lincoln argued. “It will have to be a “somebody.” In the same sense, who can replace GM CEO Rick Wagoner?
It’s true: Rick Wagoner’s career is toast. And not a moment too late. By any metric you can name– profits, market share, market capitalization, debt load, brand strength, anything– Wagoner’s administration has been an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the feds missed an important opportunity to eject Wagoner in exchange for bailout billions. Never mind; his day is done.
But replacing CEO Rick Wagoner won’t be easy. Using a more modern comparison, securing a new General Manager for a professional football team is a walk in the park. There are perhaps fifty candidates who are more-or-less qualified to run an NFL team. Anyone who is anyone in the business knows who they are. Finding someone with the experience to run a global automaker– with millions of sales, dozens of factories and worldwide reach– is a relative bitch.
There are far less international automakers than NFL franchisees.The pool of available managerial talent for GM is a lot smaller than, say, The Detroit Lions. While football teams play with one set of rules using more-than-not similar strategies, carmakers must build hideously complex products (on a five-year timeline) that compete for different customers, subject to thousands of rules, all of which are subject to constant change. Finding someone who fully understands the game, never mind how to win it, is “challenging.”
Worse, GM is a closed society. There are fiefdoms within fiefdoms within fiefdoms. Employees have national, brand, departmental and personal loyalties (to name a few). It’s not for nothing that one of today’s blogs revealed that the man in charge of GM’s Strasbourg plant holds a Harvard MBA– just like his CEO and COO. And if you think intra-mural talent is the answer, look at ex-Toyota exec Jim Press’ progress at Chrysler.
Not only would it be hard for an outsider to get accurate information about what’s going on at GM’s sharp end (or filter what info he or she gets), it would be even harder to ensure that necessary changes are implemented.
Mulally at Ford? Nardelli at Chrysler? Apples and oranges. The Ford family owns enough special stock give Mulally the authority he needs. Same goes for private equity group Cerberus and Nardelli. GM has no single shareholder or directors’ block. Anyone who managed to displace GM’s existing mob would need the support of the board and, realistically, the division heads.
Bottom line: unless the GM board was displaced and company’s current infrastructure destroyed, any replacement boss would “have to be” one of GM’s lower bosses. Not that it matters.
Two years after his Cabinet called for McClellan’s head, Lincoln found his “someone.” General Grant discovered that his new/old army was nowhere near the smooth-running machine he’d had out West. One of Grant’s staff offered a simple solution: get Eli Parker (the judge advocate) drunk on the worst whiskey available, give him a knife and tell him to bring back ten major-general’s scalps. Grant was intrigued, “which ones?”
Wrong answer. Grant’s problem wasn’t so much the individual major-generals as the fact there were too damn many of them.
And so it is with GM. Once again, the root of all evil is logistical inertia, or lack thereof. General Motors North America is hamstrung by its surplus of brands; hence products, dealers, marketing and mandarins. Even with GM’s new “four channel” internal and external realignment– HUMMER, Cadillac, Saab; Buick, Pontiac, GMC; Saturn and Chevy– there still are too many hungry mouths too feed. And execs feeding them.
GM’s size was once its main advantage. It’s now its greatest weakness. With the U.S. market shrinking and share dropping, all that once-impressive industrial might just means more to cut. Worse, the sheer size of the company makes it very hard to cut effectively. Every cut must be filtered through the demands of four or more “lines” and double that number of brands. Worse, each change disrupts the balance of power between the divisions within the company and on the market.
Finding another “someone” to create effective regime change at GM, someone who can act decisively then track and balance the progress of his or her changes, could well be impossible. But it’s worth a try. As for the current administration at GM, let’s give “Honest Abe” the last word. “Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”
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the man in charge of GM’s Strasbourg plant holds a Harvard MBA
As an MBA who works with operations every day, I can tell you right there that MBAs don’t prepare students to work in operations, the same that engineering degrees don’t prepare for management.
And yet, both cases happen all the time.
As for your analogy, I doubt that the GM board is anywhere close to Abe when it comes to taking hard decisions….
As a native Illinoisian and hobby historian, I like the analogy.
You could have also mentioned that RickyBobby was a book cooker before he was CEO. But really, is there really enough time left that this is a concern? GM is almost past C11 and headed for C7. Won’t they just end up in recievership?
When I worked for a Tier 1 supplier for GM in the 90’s, there was never a shortage of ‘just promoted’ project manager engineers from GM who could not calculate the net difference of their ass from a hole in the ground. And if they had been in the position long enough to finally make that distinction, they were soon promoted to the next level. At the level I dealt with, the Peter Principal was a fully functioning daily way of life for GM. I can only imagine the same thing existed within upper management. Is it any wonder that the former chief book flambe’r has now successfully dashed the mighty ship onto rocks and let the waves tear it to shreds.
I disagree with this analysis. Running an automotive company is not brain surgery. You don’t have to be an expert in everything, you just have to know how to ask the right questions and have good business sense. There are tons of people out there who could do the job much more effectively than Wagoner. I’m not saying they should hire some untested community organizer with no management experience whatsoever to come in and run the whole company, but anyone with experience running a manufacturing company, large or small is qualified, IMHO.
As an ex-Secretary of Defense was fond of saying “A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s.” GM has been run by B’s (or worse) for along time, so I suspect the whole management structure is incompetent and self-serving, not just the top few layers.
Changing just the top man would be ineffectual.
It’s kinda like being the President of the United States: by definition anyone that could do the job well wouldn’t want it and anyone that wants the job is probably vain, power hungry, and greedy.
Having said that, I really thought the Cerberus purchase of Dodge/Chrysler/Whatever would be the template for how to strip down and fix a car company – a bunch of outsiders come in, slice off the bureaucratic flab, and build it back from the ground up. Instead, they seem to have fallen under the same spell-of-stupidity that has paralyzed GM and the rest of Detroit.
I was a Chevy guy growing up. I have fond memories of some of their great cars, and I still love the Corvette and the Silverado. But at this point I think GM will simply flail about until they reach C7.
And the CEO/President really doesn’t matter anymore except as a delivery boy who ultimately will take the Chapter 11 papers to the Board.
This business is stupid complex. Really. Just to homolagate a car to run in this country, it’s necessary to supply about 50 tests and documents.
To that, add, in a big market: emissions regulations, crash regulations, myriad safety regulations, lightning regs, etc… Then you start with taxes, foreign commerce, accounting…
I almost forgot internal standards… which every automotive manufacturer has. For almost every detail in the vehicle: paint, bolts, rust protection, the list goes on…
After you kind of finish with that… multiply that for 120+ countries were your company has a brach.
Yeap, the CEO must have at least a notion of what’s going on.
I would put my bets, just for a change… debunk the beancounters from CEO, and put an engineer with some beancounting abilities and sound product/business/opportunity/politic (internal not the other) habilities.
Also, since that person is going to face a tough war… bring in the baddest mother fucker you can find. It will need the baddest stick to do the job and chop all the heads needed in the carnage.
Grass will grow from your cheeks and GM will be run by Rabid Rick or somebody just like him.
Is Ron Zarella available?
I have no doubt that Carl-Peter Forster would be tremendously better than Wagoner from day one. He understands brand, he understands product, he’s international, he knows GM.
Stingray :
I would put my bets, just for a change… debunk the beancounters from CEO, and put an engineer with some beancounting abilities and sound product/business/opportunity/politic (internal not the other) habilities.
Isn’t that what Ford did?
since that person is going to face a tough war… bring in the baddest mother fucker you can find. It will need the baddest stick to do the job and chop all the heads needed in the carnage.
Isn’t that what Cereberus did?
Like I said before, GM needs a revolutionary leader, not an evolutionary (slow and plodding)leader like Rick.
Someone that will come in and make the tough choices to get America’s once-proud industrial powerhouse on track to profitability.
I vote Farago. I’ve come to believe he’s got GM’s core problems diagnosed and actually has a decent plan (sans bankruptcy part) to fix it. Maybe then we could begin reading a GM RebirthWatch on TTAC.
Too bad DeLorean is gone. That’d have been a hoot to watch.
Iacocca is too old and deranged.
I say get Kerkorian back in along with his sidekick York and let them run the show for a while. Say one year.
After that one year (when GM will be half it’s current size and making a profit) the show gets turned over to whoever the board picks.
The major change in direction of the American buyer is to look for a car that has good gas mileage.
How is this done improve engine efficiency, reduce weight, and reduce power to weight ratio.
Now where is this being done?
How come it is not being done?
How much time does it take to reduce the power of an engine and then implement change?
They need to fire somebody.
“Too bad DeLorean is gone. That’d have been a hoot to watch.”
Delorean personal baby from beginning to end was the VEGA, rust out one year and engine that didn’t last 40,000 miles at 12 mpg. What a loser.
I would propose to appoint Manfred Wennemer, who has run the German Tire Maker Continental AG for about 7 years until the company was taken over by Schaeffler last month. He turned a loss making company into a highly profitable automobile parts maker, taking on labor unions without fear, making tough changes and cutdowns. The perfect man, although certainly no GM insider – but we don’t want one either, or?
The other problem here is that whoever replaced Snorin’ Rick would essentially be taking command of a sinking ship. Some really aggressive execs relish a challenge if it seems like a resume-builder, but if the new CEO is in charge for Chapter 11 and/or Chapter 7, s/he is gonna share a disproportionate amount of the blame. I’d think twice about that.
As for the question of qualifications, I think Michael makes a compelling point here — the effectiveness of whoever ends up in charge is going to be directly dependent on how willing the General’s many squabbling fiefdoms are to cooperate.
I highly recommend De Lorean’s book with J. Patrick Wright, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. De Lorean’s self-promotion and self-aggrandizement aside, it’s an instructive portrait of GM’s internal politics, which I don’t think have changed much since then. His five-year tenure at Chevrolet amounted to being brought in to salvage other people’s messes by superior who didn’t want him there and colleagues who were thoroughly determined to see him fail, spinning everything he did or tried to do into a black mark against him. Even if you dismiss half of it as De Lorean’s ego working overtime, it’s a pretty dour picture, and it seems like that would be the situation into which any new, non-insider CEO would be walking. It’ll be like firemen going into a burning building full of snipers.
hetrun,
i agree! Kevorkian should be brought in; he’s no longer incarcerated. Oh wait, you said Kerkorian… never mind..
François Castaing, who’d come from Chrysler from AMC (and before that, Renault) might be a good choice for GM’s COO.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about AMC and how the purchase of AMC actually saved Chrysler: “According to Robert Lutz, former President of Chrysler, the AMC acquisition was a big and risky undertaking. The purchase was part of Chrysler’s strategic “retreat-cum-diversification” plan that he states did not have the right focus. Initially the goal was to obtain the world-renowned Jeep brand. However, Lutz discovered that the decision to buy AMC turned out to be a gold mine for Chrysler. At that time, Chrysler’s management was attempting to find a model to improve structure and operations, “something that would help get our minds unstuck and thinking beyond the old paradigms that we were so familiar with”. In this transformation, “Chrysler’s acquisition of AMC was one of the all-time great moments in corporate serendipity” according to Lutz “that most definitely played a key role in demonstrating how to accomplish change”.
According to Lutz (1993), while AMC had its share of problems, it was far from being a bunch of “brain-dead losers”. He describes the “troops” at AMC as more like the Wake Island Marines in battle, “with almost no resources, and fighting a vastly superior enemy, they were able to roll out an impressive succession of new products”. To further solidify the organizational competencies held by AMC, Lee Iacocca agreed to retain former AMC units, such as engineering, completely intact. In addition, AMC’s lead engineer, François Castaing, was made head of all engineering at Chrysler. In an unthinkable strategic move, Castaing completely dismantled the entrenched Chrysler groups. In their place AMC’s “platform team” were implemented. These were close-knit cross-functional groups responsible for the whole vehicle, as contrasted with Chrysler’s highly functional structure. In this capacity, Castaing’s strategy was to eliminate the corporate administrative overhead bureaucracy. This move shifted corporate culture and agitated veteran executives who believed that Chrysler’s reputation as “the engineering company” was being destroyed. Yet, according to the popular press, by the 1980s Chrysler’s reputation was totally shot, and by Lutz’s view only dramatic action was going to change that. In summary, Chrysler’s purchase of AMC laid the critical foundation to help re-establish a strategy for its revival in the 1990s.”
Anyone know of Mr. Castaing is still alive? Having a SUCCESSFUL automotive engineer actually in charge of General Motors day to day automotive operations – wow. What a novel idea, eh?
Gerald C. Meyers, CEO of American Motors until 1982, is I think teaching university in Southern Michigan. I wonder if he’d be willing to take on the CEO post of General Motors?
The problems of running current-day GM are much the same as he had 26-27 years ago at AMC. Lack of money (an understatement!), a shrinking market share, old factories, union demands… he’s seen it all. He was pretty much “pulled” from the job because by 1982, AMC had to go hat in hand to Renault for more money (i.e. Renault bought up more of AMC/Jeep and put their own executives in charge). Kind of like now – with the Government bailing out GM – but not putting any new executives in charge.
Then with the Meyers / Castaing team in place, clear out the deadwood from the GM executive ranks (which is probably 80% of it), downsize to suit, cut down to two worldwide “automotive groups” – Chevrolet (aka GMDaewoo in South Korea) and Saturn–Buick-Opel (Saturn in NA, Buick in China and NA, Opel elsewhere in the world), with Cadillac, and GMC-Pontiac “sub-brands” under the SBO Group for NA. Sell SAAB.
How about it, GM board of bystanders?
Wasn’t that about the time where Abe sent a memo to one of those generals saying something like ‘You have an army you don’t appear to be using, might I borrow it?’ Classic line I have always loved, but never knew the veracity of it.
mykeliam :
Isn’t that what Ford did?
Maybe yes. But Mullaly was an “alien” to this industry when he started. Talented? of course, nobody discuss that
Isn’t that what Cereberus did?
Ummm, I don’t think so. Nardelly maybe a bad mofo, but he’s not the right guy to run Chrysler.
Now if you add the qualities as I stated…
BTW, re: my crazy ideas about the auto industry?
I wrote to American Motors (then being an AMC fan) when I was in the military, stuck in England, in 1976.
Said – “why don’t you get a license for this car which JUST went out of production, and maybe even the tools & dies – and build it in Kenosha?”
The car? Already an unwanted step-child. But well engineered and already having had all the bugs worked out from 1970-1975.
http://web.telia.com/~u31614134/eK70.html
But can you imagine what AMC could have done with a thoroughly MODERN, slightly reskinned (and maybe lowered a tad) version of this car, brought up to US specs? Could have been introduced as early as 1977, for the 1978 model year. The year that Chrysler’s successful Omni-Horizon front drive cars came out.
Front wheel drive. Four cylinders. All independent suspension. Triple brake circuits. Crush zones. Roomy interior. Huge trunk. Boxy shape (perfect for the late 1970’s and early 1980’s “style” until the aero-design era of mid 1980’s).
Interestingly enough AMC DID end up with a VW product. They bought the ex-Audi 4 cylinder engines and design rights for the Audi 100 2 litre OHC engine (also used in the original Porsche 924) and installed them in some 1979-1981 AMC Spirits and Concords. I’ve always wondered if my letter was the catalyst? I’ll never know.
“By any metric you can name– profits, market share, market capitalization, debt load, brand strength, anything– Wagoner’s administration has been an unmitigated disaster.”
Wrong. Wagoner’s tenure hasn’t been a success, but I’d hesitate to call it a failure, let alone a disaster. In many ways, he’s the “right guy wrong time.” GM needed its current leadership 15 years ago while it was royally screwing up in the 90’s.
The GM of today is, unlike the GM of the past 20 years, a competitive car company, and did so under steady improvement over the past model cycles (like Hyundai) instead of radical new products (like Nissan.) So in regards to at least one metric- the actual product- GM has been success.
The temptation for a lot of armchair enthusiasts is to say GM needs a radical change like that of Chrysler or Nissan in previous generations. (cutting, major shake ups, etc.) Chrysler and Nissan are both plagued by the quality demons from their respective ‘transitions.’ GM needs to stay focused and keep building improving (and right now they’re one of the FEW manufacturers who are improving… Honda and Toyota decided to go the wrong way). It’s going to take awhile, but eventually people will start trusting them again (and it’s not going to happen overnight.)
Is Carlos Goshn happy over a Renault/Nissan? If he wants another career challenge, he can come stateside and clean the General’s house. This guy is one of the few at the top actually worth his keep.
Menno you brought Castaing and AMC… bright.
A bunch of people with no money or resources… who made the XJ.
LONG LIVE TO THE UNDERDOG!!!
Running any large corporation is not any great mystery. You have to understand that your customer comes first for without him/her you don’t have a business. Next you have to delegate. Give assignments to your underlings and if they let you down fire their asses out the door. Paying off severance is better and cheaper in the long run. If you encounter resistance from those with fiefdoms to protect tell them either get on board or get out. The problem today is that CEO’s have no loyalty to their companies only to their paycheques, why else would they demand golden parachutes. The captain should go down with his ship, then he has a vested interest in keeping it afloat. GM desperately needs the baddest mother.
@mikeolan: not sure if you’ve been paying attention the past eight years, but GM’s marketshare (38% to 20%) and their market value ($50B to $6B) has dropped like rocks.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s called value destruction.
In business, the name of the game is value creation. So to say that GM should keep doing what they’re doing is akin to saying: “Despite several failed attempts at suicide, I think they’re on the right track.”
mikeolan :
September 25th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
“By any metric you can name– profits, market share, market capitalization, debt load, brand strength, anything– Wagoner’s administration has been an unmitigated disaster.”
Wrong. Wagoner’s tenure hasn’t been a success, but I’d hesitate to call it a failure, let alone a disaster. In many ways, he’s the “right guy wrong time.” GM needed its current leadership 15 years ago while it was royally screwing up in the 90’s.
The GM of today is, unlike the GM of the past 20 years, a competitive car company, and did so under steady improvement over the past model cycles (like Hyundai) instead of radical new products (like Nissan.) So in regards to at least one metric- the actual product- GM has been success.
GM’s domestic sales are falling like a rock. Sales in all non-emerging foreign markets (that is, places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe) are doing the same. Their sales are only increasing in areas where most of the population is buying their first car, and therefore have little history with the company and are not nearly as picky as the customers in the more developed nations are.
Now, some of this may be the fault of previous management’s decision to build shit, amoung other factors outside GM’s control, but the fact is, that under the current management’s watch, GM has gone from bad to worse, in terms of it’s chances at surviving as a going concern.
This move shifted corporate culture and agitated veteran executives who believed that Chrysler’s reputation as “the engineering company”
Wow. That must have been a looooooooong time ago. By the time I came into the world, Chrysler was the K-Car company.
argentla wrote:
The other problem here is that whoever replaced Snorin’ Rick would essentially be taking command of a sinking ship. Some really aggressive execs relish a challenge if it seems like a resume-builder, but if the new CEO is in charge for Chapter 11 and/or Chapter 7, s/he is gonna share a disproportionate amount of the blame. I’d think twice about that.
That’s what Delphi did with Steve Miller. His claim to fame was he was a turnaround guy. That got shot to hell. There are those out there that will take a company through chapter 11/7. That’s who GM needs to find. Even though they have their own bankruptcy lawyers on staff, they need a leader. One way or another…
I’ve been thinking about a new leader for GM for a while now, one name that keeps popping up for some reason is Richard Branson. Energetic passionate knows how to run big multinationals. Could really get the company and the people going now with his enthusiasm. Definately somone from outside the company, somone who can think outside the GM box. Either that or the fella that turned around Ford of Europe.
Stingray, what made me think about it were comments I’d read in historical papers written by Studebaker-Packard and AMC executives back in the dark ages of the 1950’s when neither one were likely to survive ’til next week. (I’m the “unofficial automotive historian” in TTAC’s B&B – an actual member of the Society of Automotive Historians group, in fact).
A synopsis of the comments I had in mind would go something like this: “We hired some talent from GM (or Ford) and they couldn’t cope with the pressure. The job was too tough for them.”
Obviously all of the S-P executives are long dead but a few ex-AMC guys still are around. Not to mention the fact that AMC was the #4 of the BIG FOUR in 1961, and Studebaker had died by Christmas 1963 (with the siamese twin – tied to the rotting brother – dying in Canada by spring 1966).
AMC “succeeded” in that if it weren’t for AMC, Chrysler would not have made it THIS far. In fact, I would say that it was DAIMLER which helped to kill Chrysler.
Has anyone mentioned the possibility of Ron Zarella taking the helm?
Menno:
I agree with you in this… among other things in this discussion
AMC “succeeded” in that if it weren’t for AMC, Chrysler would not have made it THIS far. In fact, I would say that it was DAIMLER which helped to kill Chrysler.
And as a matter of fact… they did.
I have read a lot in allpar (not enough chrysler reading) and one of the very bright spots I found was the Neon development.
But then… after you see the daimler “good influence”… read Caliber/Liberty/Commander/Sebring… I can only say they screwed it big time.
Has anyone mentioned the possibility of Ron Zarella taking the helm?
Yes, exactly. It’s clear the Board of Bystanders need new contact lenses. Ron’s the perfect man for the job. He’ll “market” GM to new levels of success (read: complete the deathmarch of the Deathmarches).
I nominate myself. GM can’t survive long term w/o CH 11 reorganization. I’d pull the C-11 switch faster than a cat can lick his ass.
Made ME laugh, Dynamic…. I don’t have a cat, but I have a 110 pound (50 kilo) Newfoundland – and – um how can I put this? Sometimes you hear the most DISGUSTING snorting snuffing and licking noises as she “cleans herself”. We just say “SNOWDONIA! That’s not very ladylike!”
She then just looks at us and gives us a big Newfy dog-grin. (Mind you, if she later decides it’s time for a sloppy kiss on daddy, I always refuse! “Ewwwwwww! Where’s that nose and tongue been recently, Snowy?!”)
“My Dad was a Prophet”
As a kid growing up in Michigan in the 50s and early 60s I can still recall my late Dad(he was a GM Exec VP) coming home from management conferences after being away for several days. He would rail at the(his words) blow hards, yes men, brown noses and do nothings he would encounter at those conferences. You see my Dad was a hands on, get it right, work your ass off kind of guy and he was eaten alive inside by the ineptitude at the executive management level at GM even 50 years ago. It was an insurmountable tidal wave even then. Too many inside cliques and fiefdoms as was previosly stated.
He had his first heart attack at 50 and thankfully lived till 60. To this day I still believe it was GM that killed him. He graduated from General Motors Institute in Flint and worked his entire career for GM, never had another job. He loved that damn company.
His words still echo, “someday this will all implode”.
“My Dad was a Prophet”
I realize that I may step on toes when I say this, but am I the only one that thinks that along with too many lawyers there are too many MBAs? Several of these Masters run companies and I have to believe some of the management crew at GM has this “qualification.”
With that said, just imagine the number of MBAs that are involved in finance and credit markets.
I feel more comfortable about things knowing this.
The CVT (new Transmission) problem was a known problem within the CVT engineering team. They stated to management flat out do not put the CVT (new transmission) into production it will fail.
The management team stated we needed to sell it we will sell it. They sold it and the CVT failed.
This problems should have lead to the termination of every management team member and staff that allowed this to happen. The engineers should have been repremimanded because they did not send a letter to the CEO. The CEO should be terminated for not having this process in place.
This is what is wrong with GM
Menno,
Great idea, suggesting Gerry Meyers. The last couple of decades, he’s been a professor at Carnegie-Mellon (now retired) and Michigan and has been running a crisis management consultancy . He is a great leader, and I was very fortunate to have learned under him at CMU’s business school.
Unfortunately, Professor Meyer is no spring chicken — I doubt his health is up to the task of the greatest turnaround in the history of the auto industry.
Whoever is chosen, I suggest someone young. This is a fight that will take 10+ years to fight — guys like Captain Kirk, Lutz and Iacocca are just too old to sustain the battle for that long.
BostonTeaParty – it wasn’t a fella that turned round Ford Europe – it was their top management acting as a Team – you know, like how Toyota operate. And pulling them to GM now would be a blow to Ford Europe, and then to Ford US…. with no guarentee of saving the General. If there’s little or no chance that all of them will make it, we want at least one of the D3 to survive, don’t we?
I suspect even now there’s a team from the glass house in the air aiming to ‘lame’ their European colleagues just like villages lamed their blacksmiths in medival times to stop them leaving.
I think Ford did a good job hiring Mulally. He had experience in putting together massive multi-national efforts to assemble incredibly complex machines (Boeing airliners) for real customers on real schedules, for a profit. I have no idea why Chrysler hired Nardelli – he was already a poster-boy for overpayed incompetence from his Home Depot days. But unlike Ford or Chrysler when they brought in outsiders, GM actually has some islands of excellence amid the toxic ocean of their North American ops.
If I were the Chairman of the Board (Rick would now be in the trunk of a J-body at the bottom of the Detroit River, a fitting end) and had to hire someone to run GM, I would probably not look outside the box of GM, ironically. I would take a look at those islands of success within GM and find out who was responsible. Pockets of success at GM are admittedly rare, but there are some gems in the rough. The Corvette is one, the re-birth of Cadillac (barring the obvious badge-engineering) is another. The GMT-900’s are a masterpiece of both engineering and bad timing, but nonetheless they are all organizational successes that make iron their respective markets have a demand for (even if the demand is shrinking, a’la GMT-900).
I don’t know who those people are, but in their respective authorities within the Mothership they fought the battle and won somehow. That’s a heck of a reference to run the whole company. I am guessing that these people probably have a chip on their shoulder regarding the competition and the upper-management of GM itself, and would love some revenge so-to-speak. This would also be a good thing.
So, I would get that pool of people together somehow and begin to fill the ranks of suddenly open positions that I would be creating on the other side of the ledger. Instead of picking someone who likes a good corporate fight to be CEO (fighting like that, no matter how good you are at it, wastes precious, precious time and attention from more important things), I would also equip the CEO with a ruthless SOB hatchet-man to do his dirty work for him. Washington had Hamilton, FDR had Harry Hopkins…shit, even Stalin had Beria to use some other historical analogies.
As a group, TTAC’s B&B, in their haste to nominate a new GM CEO, have forgotten that, as it stands, the group who will make that decision is the group that has been patiently tolerating the existing CEO all this time. Maybe we should redirect our torches and pitchforks toward the board of directors. Who are these guys and what are their qualifications? Are they corporate has-been’s, coasting on their accomplishments of 30 years ago? How long have they served? When will they go home?
Last week, when the first official pictures of the Volt appeared, several knowledgeable people remarked that the car in the photo was probably a clay facsimile. But even if you hate that car in the photos, you have to admit that making a pile of dirt look exactly like a highly finished metallic/plastic/rubber/glass assembly is a real talent indeed. Now, suppose GM’s internal staff perverted that talent into making a clay facsimile of a board of directors. Forget about “feet of clay”. This board has arms, legs, heads and torsos of clay as well. And when angry customers, stockholders, legislators, suppliers, and employees write in wondering if you EVEN HAVE a BOD, just send them a picture…
John,
Nice observation on the BoD. Perhaps they are manufactured in the same factory that made Al Gore?
GM needs a complete outsider, beholden to no one within the corporate structure, that will demand personal accountability and revamp the matrix. Unfortunately, this was needed many years ago and now it’s just too late given the crush of its capital structure on negative earnings/cash flow from North America.
@phargophil & @James2
Precisely why Zarella is the ticket. No MBA. There was a minor clerical error leading people to believe he had obtained one from NYU, but in fact he was too cool for school. He must have been wearing competitors lenses when he jotted his resume on a cocktail napkin.
In the first hundred days of a Zarella stewardship, the General could create a few new brands, add cladding to the lower stories of the Ren Cen and launch some patriotic new ads.
Problem solved. Crisis averted.
I agree with an earlier poster that someone from the supplier base or a related industry might be qualified. I’ve been pondering this for a long time, and the person I keep thinking of is Roger Penske. He seems to know how to get things done.
“several knowledgeable people remarked that the car in the photo was probably a clay facsimile”
Any of them actually see the car? I did, up close, it wasn’t clay.
On a related note, I hear Matt Millen is looking for a job…
Problem was, when Lincoln finally fired McClellan, he had to go through several other Generals who couldn’t fight (Hooker), were incompetent (Burnside), or wouldn’t press his advantage (Meade), before he found Grant.
Does GM have enough time to go through a succession of failures before it finds its Grant?