Did you think that finally sacking Mark LaNeve might have been another step in the direction towards the “culture change” promised land? Time for some new meds. And while we usually have to sit on our sour-puss predictions for a few days before being proven right, GM decided to back us up early this time. Automotive News [sub] reports that none other than Buick-GMC boss Susan Docherty will be replacing LaNeve at the pinnacle of the GM sales operation. “She brings a fresh perspective to the job and she has an extraordinarily high level of energy,” says Fritz Henderson. By which he means she’s a lifer, and owes her career to the timid, inept culture Henderson is simultaneously a product of and ostensibly bent on breaking.
And despite having said just hours ago that “I do think there is a benefit to bringing in outsider. I think we would benefit from fresh perspective,” good-old-boy Fritz managed to lock hope-and-change Fritz in a closet for this decision. “I’d be very nervous about putting someone into the sales function who didn’t understand how it worked at the time we’re going through a dealer restructuring like we’re doing,” is Fritz’s self-justifying verdict. After all, if he really believed in changing GM, would he let himself stay in charge? “Mark’s done a heck of a job in a very difficult environment going through this,” Henderson continued, removing any doubt that he’ll be the next GM insider to be dragged away from the mess kicking and screaming. “I give him enormous credit.”
To be fair, hope-and-change Fritz also points out (very accurately) that GM’s bailout-baby status makes it hard to hire outsiders. GM is still waiting for guidelines for hiring and compensation. On the other hand, even if GM could offer big stock option packages to outside talent, well, there is no stock. And if there were stock, it would be worthless. So why not perpetuate the sclerotic stranglehold of lifer execs? What else was the bailout for?
114 Comments on “Docherty Replaces LaNeve: GM’s Cultural Revolution More Like Musical Chairs...”
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Expecting change from GM is like thinking this time Lucy won’t yank the football away. Though they may have found their one employee more clueless than LaNeve.
But note that Henderson gave another hint elsewhere: clearly they can’t get anybody good for the money Treasury will allow them to pay.
Can I call’em, or can’t I?
(actually, this is one of those times when it sucks to guess right…)
She an engineer?
Thought so. Feggetagowdit. GM is doomed.
Run by the gummit (a law school dropout), managed by folks to whom mechanics 101 is a flunkout course.
Let’s hear it for more X-cars……
Search through the TTAC Archives and you will find that over two years ago Susan Docherty was identified as a person well out of her element, worse than a doe caught in the headlights.
That Henderson pulled this stunt proves two things: Susan is too dumb to grasp she is being thrown to the wolves and Fritz could give a rip about the whole GM deal.
Good luck, lady. You’re gonna need it and a busload of faith to get by.
She an engineer?
Thought so. Feggetagowdit. GM is doomed.
Lutz is an engineer. See how well that went?
Katsuaki Watanabe is an economist. Fujio Cho is a lawyer. See how well that went?
Note to engineers: being an engineer does not automatically mean you’re good at everything. What about being an engineer automatically qualifies you to be a good marketer? A motivator or leader? A turnaround expert? A manager?
Answer: nothing.
God.
Damn.
It.
Why General Motors?!
Susan combines two deadly ingredients: Ignorance and Arrogance. Mark LaNeve was a star in comparison.
I am sure GM has someone who could do this job other than Susan. She has been and will continue to be a disaster.
@psarhjinian
Being an engineer is no guarantee of success, but being an arrogant, inbred MBA buzzword machine is a guarantee for failure.
Her market is those who race out to a new car, fling open the door, jump in, and start playing with the radio and navigation system to the total abandonment of the rest of the vehicle.
General Motors is convinced this is how EVERYONE buys a new car.
Eighteen percent market share and continuing to fall…
JSF22
Well-spotted on the pay front.
As a TARP recipient, GM’s executive pay is already capped. Obama’s Pay Czar has announced his intention to restrict TARPies’ non-pay compensation to stock ownership.
GM doesn’t have any stock, nor will it (mark my words). So they can’t pay enough to get good outside talent.
What GM should do: leave the position vacant.
Oh well. Guess this old dog ain’t gonna learn new tricks anytime soon.
So let’s crack open a cold one and wait for the moment when the ol’ girl just can’t move anymore and falls dead, then and there. The corpse can then be buried in a semi-dignified manner.
Assuming leopards can’t change their spots, Fritz’s observations are correct: Susan will bring a fresh perspective and a high level of energy.
Unfortunately, that perspective will be captured in incoherent form on multiple Post-It Notes, and the energy will be expelled using multi-colour highliters to further obliterate any salvageable information remaining on said Post-It Notes.
Watching this train wreck is even harder than being a Leafs fan.
Watching the video… Susan is pandering to what she thinks her fellow skirts would like in a vehicle, like rugrat entertainment and backup cameras. The Terrain is very ugly, and maybe thats its only selling points.
Fujio Cho is a lawyer.
Fujio Cho is not a lawyer. He got a degree in law at Tokyo University in 1960. But that is an undergraduate degree and does not qualify him to be a lawyer in Japan.
Many people planning a career in business, especially back then, study law as an undergraduate. The top ranks in many of Japan’s top companies have a lot of people with law degrees.
Tokyo University is the most prestigious university in Japan. The faculty of law is the most prestigious part of Tokyo University. Getting a law degree there says a lot.
Anyone capable of doing this job wouldn’t want it.
DEZ
Good luck Susan, all of us that are depending on GM for our future are cheering you on. Go get e’m girl.
Daanii2: GM has plenty of people with degrees from Harvard and Stanford–including Susan Docherty.
I don’t know enough about Susan Docherty to say whether or not this is a bad move. From the time I spent observing life inside GM, I learned that you can tell next to nothing about what these people are actually like and what they are capable of from reading their depictions in the press.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
Won’t get fooled again.
Other than Corvette and not even a close second, Silverado as a model name another GM car or truck model that since to the late 1980’s it has stuck with.
They ditch models faster any other major car company.
Introduce x model, promote the hell out of it, see some sales success, reduce ads for x, maybe a redo in 4 or 5 years and then, Hey! look what we’ve got! The new “y”! Better than the old “x”, although they never mention x by name. This has been their downfall.
Can you imagine Toyota ditching the Camry. For a new 4 door sedan with a “new” name?
These guy’s have wasted more successful brand names than any other auto maker, and it shows.
Every time they ditch another model, all of those x buyers who really liked their x are left at the alter.
Sorry, but we have a new woman now and your just not attractive anymore, sorry.
Can you imagine Toyota ditching the Camry. For a new 4 door sedan with a “new” name?
To be fair, there’s a reason for that: “Camry” has positive brand equity, while most of what GM has sold has not. It makes sense to abandon a model name when it becomes a liability.
It’s a moot point, though, when your whole brand is tarnished.
What a roller-coaster….
Goodbye Mark Laneve -> Woo Hoo, New GM actually gets it right. There is hope for them after all!!!
Hello Susan Docherty -> (Facepalm) All hope is gone.
The whole thing strikes me as being irrelevant. LaNeve was in marketing, and he’s being replaced by someone whose primary responsibility was marketing.
GM’s primary problem has been with product, not so much with marketing. I don’t see how anyone taking LaNeve’s job is in a position to fix what is wrong with the business.
One of the real problems is Lutz, whose ideas do have play and who generally makes bad decisions. He’s still there and until he’s replaced with someone who can move the culture in a different direction, I can’t imagine anything improving.
With the Terrain, you get a feature that nobody else has … this sweet dog locked in the trunk.
Awesome, I like dogs. Sad looking guy couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
I don’t suffer run of the mouth marketing well. So you put the LCD screens on the seat backs so that you have an unobstructed view. View of what? You just explained how the rear facing camera with integrated radar is the one feature that is going to save your child from a horrifying death when trying to back this box down your driveway.
The whole thing strikes me as being irrelevant. LaNeve was in marketing, and he’s being replaced by someone whose primary responsibility was marketing.
Technically, La Neve was demoted to Sales alone, losing the bulk of his marketing duties, much of which have gone to Lutz.
I didn’t think this was really that bad a move. La Neve wasn’t so bad at sales—he’d probably make a decent regional manager—but it’s his marketing skills that were suspect at best. Docherty is purely marketing, which may not be a good thing for someone coming into a position like VP of Sales.
You are right about Lutz.
This is not a net gain versus old GM: we now have—still—an engineer and old-school product planner in charge of marketing, and an ineffective marketer in charge of sales; before we had a salesman doing marketing & sales, one of which he was ok at, and a product guy doing what amounted to PR work, which we wasn’t bad at.
The only way I could understand this is if Docherty was the best that they could find. I’ll believe this: any competent sales executive wouldn’t touch GM as it currently stands. They butchered their product plans to stave off bankruptcy and are at least two to three years from having something for a sales VP to really work with.
The only way I could understand this is if Docherty was the best that they could find.
How anyone could have been expected to promote the Buick-Pontiac-GMC channel effectively is beyond me.
The whole concept was poorly thought out. I assume that the idea of having a BPG channel was Wagoner’s, and that Docherty was probably not relevant to its creation.
I wouldn’t be too quick to shoot someone down who got stuck with that lineup of cars. You could be the most talented marketer on the planet, but if they handed you the G6 and told you to use it to beat the Accord, then you would have lost before you had even begun.
@psarhjinian: I am an engineer, and I agree with you. But I have also seen engineers who can do those other jobs quite well, and better than those with the educational background and titles.
As for the video, I am personally dead-set against built-in-vehicle entertainment for kids. I tell my own to look out the window and see how grand the countryside is, read a book, talk to someone, or take a nap. What a shame to drive 5 hours and all you’ve seen are two movie reruns for the 15th time. They can do that at home, and it won’t cost me thousands of dollars.
So when Susan Docherty tries to sell me on USB, backup cameras, and Wii ports, I am definitely not there.
And while the fun starts at $25k, the loaded version goes up to $38k.
You are missing the point.
Can you imagine Toyota ditching the Camry. For a new 4 door sedan with a “new” name?
To be fair, there’s a reason for that: “Camry” has positive brand equity, while most of what GM has sold has not. It makes sense to abandon a model name when it becomes a liability.
It’s a moot point, though, when your whole brand is tarnished.
I sell cars and my mother called me several years ago and asked why Ford doesn’t make the Taurus anymore. I told her that they had renamed the Taurus the 500.
She said, I don’t want a 500, I want a Taurus and if I can’t get one I will look maybe at something else.
These people who purchased, say a Cavalier and were happy with them, went back to their local Chevrolet dealer looking to buy another and were told as soon as they walked in the door. Oh, “we don’t sell the Cavalier anymore” but we do have it’s replacement the “Cobalt”.
In the minds of these buyers they think that maybe we just got lucky with “our” Cavalier and it was so bad they canceled it.
The initial conversation walking in the door promoted a negative thought from these buyers and not only do they take it as a slap in the face, but any confidence in the whole car company is just evaporated.
“Hey, you just pissed on my leg”!
A few thoughts:
1. If you think Toyota will never ditch the name Camry, then you don’t remember the Corona.
2. She does a solid job talking up the Terrain’s personality, but I just can’t get past that thing’s looks. Once again, GM has taken a softroader and tried to butch it up, just like they did with theit minivans. Maybe the Buick version will be more attractive.
3. Robert is right. GM should leave the position open, perhaps permanently. That might send the message that the focus is on producing the best cars, not on selling whatever it is the factories currently produce.
@Pch101:
How anyone could have been expected to promote the Buick-Pontiac-GMC channel effectively is beyond me.
Docherty may have been given an uphill battle, but her time with the BPG channel was an absolute pig abortion. I think there’s a big range between beating the Accord with the G6 and the “results” she achieved.
High success with HUMMER would definitely be a tough job with rising gas prices, but I would have hoped she could have avoided making it the most vilified auto brand on the planet.
Even if she’s largely blameless, and the trail of debris she leaves everywhere is just a coincidence, at the very least, her tenure at GM shows that she has no ability to put a stop to Lutz’s/GM’s terrible ideas. That means it’s just going to be business as usual.
Re my comments on engineer – I still stand by it. You’ve got to build something that actually WORKS. MBAs don’t hack it. Accountants don’t hack it.
And salesbimbos most certainly won’t hack it.
The only car GM makes that’s even remotely competitive is the ‘Vette. How many accountants/salessloths/etc are in that group?
Sorry, I ain’t buying the act. GM built junk and promoted idiots for years. Now we’re paying for it.
Obama on them.
her tenure at GM shows that she has no ability to put a stop to Lutz’s/GM’s terrible ideas.
Lutz is her superior. I don’t know how she would be able to override the boss.
I don’t know enough about her to know what she would do if she was in a higher position of authority or if she didn’t have Henderson and Lutz above her. I do know that Lutz in his present position is a textbook example of the Peter Principle in action, and that he needs to either be relegated to a lesser role, such as management of the truck line or else pushed out entirely.
One of GM’s largest legacy costs is its excessive expectations for marketing. Because it used to work well for them in the past, they assume that it still will. They need to realize that the car market is much more competitive that it once was, and that marketing has only so much value when trying to sell a second-rate product.
I am not in disagreement that ditching models is a fact of the car biz.
SherbornSean :
October 7th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
A few thoughts:
1. If you think Toyota will never ditch the name Camry, then you don’t remember the Corona
It is just when you do it over and over again you lose credibility and customers.
Go back and look at the successful sellers that GM has had over the years and they preferred to change names and platform, at considerable cost, rather than change the quality of the product and every time they chose to shed a successful model they lost market share.
GM’s motto should be, “we don’t make good cars, we just make new ones”
OK, critics, what would you do if you had her job?
50merc
Float away on my golden parachute. STAT.
I just watched the video. Good grief! When she went to the two zombie kids in the back (especially Cameron who appeared to have been taken over by some alien force) I nearly lost it. If GM thinks this is marketing, well, it’s only a matter of time until it’s really, really over. (Not to mention that this is a truly ugly vehicle.) On the subject of vehicle names, BTW, that’s really been the only realm in which GM has demonstrated creativity over the past 30 years or so. They have come up with an astounding number of names, some absolutely laughable, but many pretty good. If they’d been actually able to create equally attractive products they wouldn’t be in this mess today.
Marketing needs to have its budget eliminated and the entire staff fired. Witness the orgy of ads over the past two years as bankruptcy became inevitable (12 page spreads in the buff books), the Volt hype before the actual filing (230 MPG, coming next year), and the other vapor.
Hell, they flooded Rush Limbaugh’s program with ads as they were circling the drain, hoping they could appeal to middle America to buy their cars and trucks, oblivious to the fact that Rush and his listeners were adamantly against the bailout.
Retards. All of them.
A chimpanze flinging excrement at the wall could do a better job.
OK, critics, what would you do if you had her job?
Quit.
No, really. I’d quit. Part of being good at what you do is knowing when you’re tasked with the functionally impossible. And that’s the case here: she doesn’t have the current or products to sell nor the support and autonomy from upper management to effect the changes necessary in what has been a change-averse organization.
I still stand by it. You’ve got to build something that actually WORKS. MBAs don’t hack it. Accountants don’t hack it.
Again, Lutz is an engineer and everything he’s pushed out save the Malibu has been a sales failure, and some of this work has been colossally stupid. Just because you can build something doesn’t mean you know:
* If it’s the right thing to build for the time
* If you can motivate the people who work for or with you into helping you build it
* If you can convince your market to buy what you buld versus the products built by your equally-clever peers at your competition.
Engineers can design and build a good product, but they’re not trained to think like marketers or accountants and, if left unchecked, will make cars that are wonderful technical exercises, yet complete commercial failures. Then they’d subsequently stand around pouting about how no one appreciates their genius. Which is what Lutz is doing, incidentally. Did I mention he’s an engineer?
Not all engineers are like this, just not like all (or many) accountants or MBAs or whatevers are as bad as you make them out to be. The problem, regardless of profession, is a lack of discipline, accountability and leadership. That doesn’t go away of your name is suffixed with P.Eng any more than it would if it ended in M.B.A. or C.A.
The only car GM makes that’s even remotely competitive is the ‘Vette. How many accountants/salessloths/etc are in that group?
Probably about as many as any other group. Heck, you probably got the cream of the crop from marketing to push it, and accounting probably signed off on whatever anyone wanted.
The difference is that the Corvette was designed without compromise, where the Aveo was a compromise first and a car second. Neither car will save GM, but it has nothing to do with the number of engineers involved and everything to do with the commitment, or lack thereof, of the whole organization to the project.
There are plenty of outsiders who could come into GM in this situation and do a good job. Had Obama asked someone like Mitt Romney or Frank Macher to go in and take over GM, I think they might have brought in some good people and turned things around.
GM is not a unique company — many other companies in many other industries have been in similar straits. Some have survived. Others not. Good turnaround people exist.
But what is going on there now is just ridiculous. I remember one of the last times a government ran a car company. In East Germany the government ran Trabant. The waiting list for those sorry excuses for cars was, at one time, 20 years.
OK, critics, what would you do if you had her job?
Quit.
Ah, this is one problem with GM in a nutshell. The reason sh** floats to the top of the organization is that the many of the people who care, are passionate about building and selling good products, and have innovative thoughts gave up years ago and left out of frustration. Not all of them, of course, but enough that those who are left learn quickly that getting ahead has more to do with whose ass you kiss rather than how well you perform.
When I was at the University of Michigan years ago getting my MBA (please, be kind) Jack Smith attended one of our classes in which we were discussing some crises the company had gone through. The class basically tore him a new orifice (fun to watch, actually, as I’m sure it was rare for the chairman of GM to be told anything without many layers of whitewash).
After he left we discussed the case with the professor who said something to the effect of “you have to give the guy some credit, he has been with GM for 45 years and rose to the top position of the company.” Most of the students (most of whom had no automotive background) laughed at that thought that this was a measure of his ability or smarts as much as a measure of his ability to navigate the politics of GM. Indeed, even ten years ago GM was the example of how to NOT run a company in b-school.
“Nobody died today; you did a good job.”
Why doesn’t my job have this kind of promotion mentality?
Billy Mays never ended an infomercial with “it’s definitely something worth considering.” That is some weaksauce right there.
# Pch101 :
You could be the most talented marketer on the planet, but if they handed you the G6 and told you to use it to beat the Accord, then you would have lost before you had even begun.
The Epsilon’s a good platform. The G6’s misfortune was that it was the first out of the block, so it didn’t have the development and interior upgrades of the Saturn Aura and the Malibu, but it’s not a bad car. Not an Accord beater, but it sold pretty well when it came out – they even had Orion running additional shifts.
Actually, comparing the Malibu to the G6 shows that GM has gotten religion concerning interior design.
You guys should have been around in the bad old days when cars were really crappy. Cars are so reliable these days that people whine about cheap looking plastic panels.
Bob Lutz isn’t an engineer. His bachelor’s degree is in production management and he also has an MBA. He’s definitely on the product side of things but he’s not an engineer.
Consumer Reports rated one Malibu 9th in class and another 13th.
When the pride of the fleet gets such a drubbing yet the home office is thrilled, it should be pretty clear how this train wreck is going to come out.
I don’t know what spawned the engineer hatred here, but to set the record straight, Lutz is not a degreed propeller-head. His BS is in Production Management, and he also has an MBA. I think a more accurate criticism of his skills is that he is fundamentally an outsider who does his best work when running against the grain. Put one of those types in charge of everything – where they are The Man – and things don’t work so well. Lots of engineers fall into this category, by the way.
On the topic of product vs. marketing woes – GM has both. The company seems largely unable to connect with the needs of its prospective customers, and that generates disappointing product. And the company still doesn’t get the concept that brand is what the customers think about the company and its products. This shows up in Lutz’s frequent ranting about the “perception gap”; what he fails to realize is that perception is reality.
Heck, you probably got the cream of the crop from marketing to push it, and accounting probably signed off on whatever anyone wanted.
The difference is that the Corvette was designed without compromise,
The Corvette is designed to a price point just like every other car made in the world. Why do you think people quibble about the ZR-1’s “cheap” interior?
Still, it’s probably easier to design and build a profitable $50,000 sports car than it is to build a class competitive midsize or compact.
It’s marketing’s job to tell the engineers what to design and build along with the finance and schedule constraints that go along with it.
If marketing says “make it 10% cheaper, faster, wider, etc.” they’ll do it. If they’re clever, well that’s just gravy.
I’ve worked in engineering dept’s for both types of companies – marketing led and engineer led. Seriously, having marketing set up the big picture is better.
However, and this is a big one – If you have a crummy marketing dept. the company is doomed. When they make a mistake – it’s fatal.
Can you imagine Toyota ditching the Camry. For a new 4 door sedan with a “new” name?
Actually Toyota does the same thing when their products become duds in the market. The Yaris replaced the ‘awesome’ Echo. In Europe Toyota no longer sells a Corolla..it now sells the Auris.
You can get a pretty good idea of the health of any of the automakers just by how long they have been able to keep a nameplate around and relevant.