Quote Of The Day: Death Of A Salesman Edition

by Edward Niedermeyer

Published: October 7th, 2009

quote of the day death of a salesman edition

It’s a sad day for the dealer body. I felt GM had its best chance with him. He was a great leader and inspirational. Hopefully the rest of management will stay intact.

A Buick dealer gives the only known positive post-mortem for the latest victim of GM’s cultural revolution [via Automotive News [sub]]. A more fitting eulogy might be found here.

Edward Niedermeyer

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4 of 8 comments

Psarhjinian on Oct 07, 2009
GM might want to consider replacing a few sales and management types with real engineers capable of producing cars that we want. Check with Corvette.... Two things: 1. GM has had car guys before. Heck, they still do (Lutz comes to mind). These people end up making the cars they want, not the cars that the market wants. 2. The Corvette does not excuse GM's other sins. It's a nice car, but you cannot extrapolate GM's work with it anywhere else, except to say that it's what happens when GM doesn't phone in the effort. What GM needs is not an accountant or an engineer/car guy. What they need is someone who can kick ass and take names and get the people who ostensibly do know how to do this within GM today to do their jobs correctly and hold them accountable if they do not. Most importantly, they need that person to ensure GM develops cars that will sell for sustainable prices. The closest analogue is someone like Iacocca, who gave Chrysler things like the original Magic Wagon and the K-Cars, except that said person is going to have to do better at reliable product than Iacocca did.

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John Horner on Oct 07, 2009

Austin Greene, you might want to look at the 69 comments and counting here: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/mark-laneve-to-leave-general-motors/

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JSF22 on Oct 07, 2009

Forget it. Automotive News just reported that Susan Docherty will replace LaNeve. Any optimism about GM was misplaced, as usual.

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Accs on Oct 14, 2009

I have as much faith in Susan Docherty to replace LaNeve as I do with Bruce Ismay replacing Captain SMith... on the Titanic. Both sucked for various reasons.

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