http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.29405/pub_detail.asp

Talked about a parallel
The transmission in the earlier Chrysler magic wagon, I heard had trans that failed before W expired, so they made the 2 dollar bearing slightly thicker so it would last beyond W period.
Now with computers designers, Engineers et al can simulate when exactly the thing would blew up, either 5 mins before or after midnight.
Is that technology is so marvellous these days.

Another real story is a fnd who owns one found out the hard way is there somekind of heater valve helps to transfer the engine heat if fails the head would have excess heat build up so it looks like the head is gone. he paid dearly for a few new heads and only to sell the wagen dirt cheap. Another bloke got it figured out and motor along happily ever after.
The rad doesnt dissipate enuf heat on a hot day withA/C on, the worse scenario if u drive the hilly scenic routes too.
The best way is no A/C roll down windows , cranked up heater full, as to transform the excess heat into the cabin, is better u cook or the engine cook! We wont die in excess heat right. Unless u’re Eskimos. Newer cars that deleted the Temp gauge is also a big fault, as when the red light shows up, U’re doomed already, up the creek w/out any paddles.

Of course they were, but I think this is a myopic view of the situation — and it doesn’t mean AA is not a problem. Something like AA is a top down company wide directive that managers have to go along with. And if all these AA people are hired, the company has to do something with them — put them somewhere to do a job. And if they don’t perform these jobs well, it affects your products.

If the manager of the new Ford Freestar development program is told he has to put a whole group of AA hired women on his minivan project — he does it. So you give the group 500 million for the new minivan project and after 4 years you have a product. The problem is the product will largely reflect the general competency level of the design engineers working on it. The manger, even if he is a top-notch manager will have to essentially take whatever the engineering/design team manages to produce after 4 years. He can’t micromanage every aspect of the project and has to let the hired people do their jobs. So after 4 years they produce a minivan and it’s a lousy product — what’s the manager going to do? Give them another 200 million and another 2 years to revamp it? Hardly, you’ll likely just end up with a 700 million dollar minivan that is just as lousy that looks different and is 2 years late to market. The manager needs better people to produce a better minivan (product).

And what do you think is going to happen to a company that does AA for 20 years? The problem with poorly thought out aspects of products happens more and more and becomes a systemic company wide problem. I’m sure there are likely many other examples of poor product development at GM that have been affected by this, from the poor design of interiors of GM products in the 1990’s (woman in charge of interiors) to poor products like the Chevrolet Cavalier (give the new AA hires a chance to do a product and get their feet wet).

These types of AA programs can also have a poisonous affect on the moral of the company. If a person works their butt off and produces excellence, but gets overlooked for political reasons, he will say to himself — why should I work so hard and produce excellence results when this company doesn’t give a hoot about excellence. So I don’t really care that much either.

The guy has been working with GM for 24 years, both as an employee and as a consultant. Is he is supposed to work there for another 24 years before he is entitled to formulate a judgment?

The Detroit Defenders never cease to amaze me. Regardless of how bad it gets or insightful a critique may be, they reject it out of hand. They accept no criticism of any kind, and refuse to learn from any of it.

Ironically, the hostility of the response illustrates the problem. They don’t want to change, and they never will. Even complete failure won’t stir them into action.

It reminds me of the Black Knight of Monty Python fame, who still talks smack even after losing all of his limbs. That would be funny, if this situation with the automakers was a fictional comedy, instead of real life.

The one facet that is not yet covered is that of the infection or disease of the Detroit culture into GM. One component of this is by having a huge metro dominated by one industry and having your once key competitors next door. Inbreeding runs rampant in the form of family and friends working in all of the once big 3. There is no competitive advantage cause they all share or chase one another into the same common denominator. This also has caused their culture to have spent years dismissing other auto companies as competitors.

If you wish to debate/inquire about TTAC’s editorial stance or style, please email robert.farago@thetruthaboutcars.com.

Saying that, to stop this thread becoming a discussion of same, our Proof Reader/Copy Editor/Editor jeff Puthuff suggested we break it into smaller bits because…

a) that’s our house style
b) it will give readers a greater opportunity to debate the points within the piece
c) there is no c

There is a theme developing here: TTAC is whoring itself for traffic. I can assure you that my publishing decisions are always based on what’s good for the brand in the long term.

Our traffic continues to rise slowly, organically and steadily because we do NOT let Google analytics dictate out day-to-day editorial decisions.

We do, however, value the advice and opinions of our Best and Brightest (a.k.a. regular readers). Again, to discuss this or any other editorial issue, email me as above.

Any further comments on this topic here will be deleted as threadjacking.

Now, back to GM…

RF?

“I think the idea of workplace political career advancement is a valid one. I think there are also ALOT of people that move from one position to another without ever getting really good at what they do. A person can work a job and wait for advancement through raises and additional responsibilites or a person can switch employers often.

“How does employee turnover relate to GM’s collective expertise? I know I’ve always done MUCH better financially taking a new position with a new employer than I have staying with one company. Does Detroit suffer from the effects of employee turnover?”

I wrote a Ph.D. thesis based on an extensive observation of GM’s product development organization a decade ago. The thesis identified the factors you describe as the key reason the products were not better–few people had been in their positions long enough to have the expertise AND social relationships needed to do their jobs well. This was especially true of executives.

Packard identifies another element of this: a top-down centralized structure pairs well with a fast track career system. With a flatter, decentralized organization, what would be the point of the game?

MaryAnn Keller identified these problems in her book “Rude Awakening” back in the early 1990s.

These aspects of culture would be especially hard to change since they are not only central to GM but to traditional American business. The argument against change is that a flatter, expertise-based organization wouldn’t be able to attract talented people.

I would like to think that it would instead attract a different sort of talented person, one focused on expertise and product rather than winning the career game. But I must admit that I don’t have a successful case to point to–anyone else?

psarhjinian: exactly; placing the blame on AA is ridiculous and follows from broader political agendas, not the facts. White men are responsible for the great majority of decisions made within these companies.

highrpm: how about an entire guest editorial on the work experience of engineers within the auto companies, its consequences, and how this might be different?

Exactly! And they are up against companies with a vision and focus on excellence in a number of areas. This aspect has been evident to me for several years as an observer.

Kurt-Yes, this does describe much of our culture and certainly our government (which is, to a degree, a distillation of us). Hence, GM will get the money, regardless of how stupid their plan is.

Bunter

True, but IBM under Gerstner was able to make the necessary changes and address it’s corporate culture issues. GM can’t or wont do that, and it’s why IBM is a going concern and GM is, well, not.

The EDS and Hughes acquisitions which had been a big part of GM’s transformational strategy were never allowed to bear much fruit, and those companies were later spun back out.

Oddly enough, in retrospect it is clear that the best thing which could have happened to GM would have been for the feds to successfully break up the company on anti-trust grounds in the late 1950s like they almost did.

Ditto, by the way, for IBM.

GM’s culture is not just attitude. It is also structure. One of the unique elements of the old divisional structure of GM, the Sloan model abandoned by the company beginning in the sixties, was that each division had a culture, and the cultures could be tested against one another, so that they were constantly having to adapt to competition within the corporation, thereby collectively improving.

Replacing that with a centralized structure allows, in fact demands, a single culture, and makes that a very much top-down culture. So, the values by which the top of the company judges performance become the only relevant factors for everyone else in the company.

For many years, the basis of that judgment has been the avoidance of risk. That’s largely a mentality of finance people, not of sales people. But, it is a mentality that is short-term at all times. It avoids a show-down with the UAW because it creates a short-term loss of sales and income, for example. It comes to market second in timing and quality because it is always playing catch up. It sets as its measure a goal of being as good, not a goal of being better, because it is always following in the footsteps of others, a consequence of never risking leading.

The culture at GM is, today, very much the creation of Rick Wagoner. Those who have called for him to resign fail to appreciate that eliminating him will simply result in replacement with his clone. The last GM president truly to attempt to change the culture of the company was Roger Smith, and he was destroyed within the company as a consequence.

Though it is useful to focus on the culture at GM, there also comes a time when a culture can no longer change, when it has passed that point where survival is possible.

For GM, that point may be difficult to pinpoint, but it seems clear that it was in the past.

Only 20% of engineering undergraduates are women. I don’t know the percentage who are minority women. But if you make gender diversity a hiring criteria, you are picking from a 5x smaller pool than you would be if you were allowed to include men. And your chances of finding an excellent new hire varies proportionately. Its not that simple here, but roughly it looks like they are hiring at about half the rate for white men and twice the rate for women and minorities that you might expect if the talent was uniformly distributed and the hiring was sex and ethnicity blind.

The handwriting has been on the wall for some time now re: Detroit’s viablity. That limits the desirability of the D3 as employers, so you won’t get all the candidates you might have a few decades ago. Can the D3 find enough top hires if they eliminate or discourage that many potential job candidates? For a few a year, you might not notice or you might be able to bid for the best in the limited pool, but if you need hundreds a year, different story.

It is an error not to factor in the effects of trying to pick the best from a much smaller pool of job candidates.

Is it ok to link to the Johnson memo? Amazing read.

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/BA_gm_memo.pdf

I have issues with affirmative action—number one being that it misclassifies what is really an economic problem (poverty) as a social one (discrimination)—but that it lowers the standard of excellence is not really one of them.

What happens under AA programs is that, instead of an excellent white male engineer, you get an excellent black female one. You generally don’t hire bad employees as a function of AA, you hire them as a function of nepotism and keep them through cowardice.

The reason the Windstar sucked is because, well, Ford didn’t want to spend money making them competitive. It had nothing to do with the ovary-to-testicle ratio among it’s designers. The Aztek sucked, well, because it was the worst example of design-by-committee in history. The Compass sucks for a whole bunch of reasons, most of which have to do with Daimler systematically destroying Chrysler’s small car program, forcing them to start from scratch and with no experience and gutting their budget at the same time.

You’re making a logical error, that of inductive reasoning, by assuming that because AA programs were in place and products sucked, that AA was the reason they sucked. That’s like blaming the fall of open-seas piracy for global warming.

That any number of contemporary domestic products engineered by men sucked as much or more, and that Toyota and Honda also have AA programs, more or less proves that the problems at the domestics are perhaps a little more complex than a lack of tackle in engineering.

I think the idea of workplace political career advancement is a valid one. I think there are also ALOT of people that move from one position to another without ever getting really good at what they do. A person can work a job and wait for advancement through raises and additional responsibilites or a person can switch employers often.

How does employee turnover relate to GM’s collective expertise? I know I’ve always done MUCH better financially taking a new position with a new employer than I have staying with one company. Does Detroit suffer from the effects of employee turnover?

I have heard many times that Japanese employees stay with one company for decades and even an entire professional lifetime. What are the Europeans like in this regard?

I think it is incumbent to the author to provide that. No?

“There is a profound reluctance to make hard decisions that would cause short term pain but would lead to fixing the problem in the long run; instead there is a continual compromise of action that leads to “too little, too late” but defers immediate catastrophe.”

This statement sums up the apparent attitudes of many financial firms last year, politicians, and certain automotive firms. Many of the problems that the big three now face are the result of “leadership” being reactive instead of proactive.

@car_czar: The author never claimed to be an “expert on the internal culture of GM.”

“… it has a lot of outdated information in it.”

While I will reserve final judgment until the entire article is published, many of GM’s problems can be traced to cultural problems that have existed for a long time.

“He has no idea what the culture is like at GM, or how radically it has changed in the last 5 years.”

Well then, what is the culture like and how has it changed? I am not trying to target or mock you, but if you are going to dispute this article, please provide your insight and personal history at/with GM.

He has no idea what the culture is like at GM, or how radically it has changed in the last 5 years. I’ve read the whole paper, it has a lot of outdated information in it.

American2Buy: ” … I am also a Big Three “undesirable” when it comes to hiring, a straight white male over 40 who does’nt have family ties to the UAW.If they don’t think I’m good enough to hire their products certainly are’nt required purchases for me either. Do you also notice most of these diehard Big Three types can’t spell? Just an observation, anyway let the affirmative action and feminist types worry about keeping GM and their ilk afloat, it’s not my problem.”

Radical1: ” … As a proud member of a dying breed, white male over 40, I would have no problem leaving the BIG 3. The Big 3, especially GM, do not want to promote or hire white males. GM hires and promotes people based on sex and race and not job performance. So if GM does not want me as an emploee then I don’t want GM as a car company, ever. “

clarence possum: ” … Who wouldn’t want to leave the big three? I have worked in engineering at GM for almost 20 years, And the future doesn’t look very bright. Until they get rid rid of the political mis-management things will only get worse. GM will continue to shed the jobs of people that get the job done, and keep the arrogant and incompetent managers and affirmative action hires. “

Kurt : ” … The problem at the big automotive companies is the people dont work. I see so many people that dont know how to do their jobs. They need to get back to the days of promoting qualified people. People tell me to get rid of someone at ford/gm they will promote them to another department. Just because it is so hard to fire someone. You would never see that at a japanese company. You want to get rid of people that dont work.

T.B.:” … I worked for Ford for 7 faithful years. I worked my tail off – 12 to 15 hours per day including some weekend work and not getting paid a nickle of overtime. My philosophy was to work hard, get recognized and then promoted. Well, I got recognized and recognized and recognized. My performance reviews were 2nd to none and was a “top achiever” in Ford’s rating. My blood ran Ford blue and planned to be there for life. However, salaried benefits were cut, salaried headcount was cut, bonuses cut and raises were down to 1% for some individuals. I watched Ford management promote ill-qualified people to highly responsible positions for political reasoning. There was not any promotion based on merit and ability and Ford management loyalty was next to none.”

Confidential to Robert Farago: Thanks for fixing the spam filter.