GM's Reshuffle Revealed
GM has announced its new North American organizational shuffle [full release available here], and have included the following slides to help explain some of the changes. The clear winner: President of NA operations, Mark Reuss, who had this to say:
It’s become extremely clear to me since taking this role that there is a better way to structure this organization. The premise of the structure is simple — a clearer marketing focus to sell more vehicles, and freeing our sales and service experts to focus on customers and dealers. In order to be successful in North America, we need the right mix of product, people and structure. We’ve worked with a small group of executives to align this model and appoint the best candidates for each job.
Notice how he doesn’t call the new structure a simplification. As the following slides show, there’s nothing simple about the structure changes. In fact, the only thing that’s certain about this latest GM reshuffle is that wrestling with GM’s bureaucracy still takes up as much time for top managers as actually working on products, planning, outreach and other core business activities.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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Sorry, I still don't unerstand the difference between marketing and sales. What does Chevrolet Marketing do that Chevrolet Sales doesn't do? Does Marketing do the world wide advertising, public relations, and tell the dealers how to design their stores? Does Sales just put pressure on the franchisee and sales people we have to deal with?
Buick and GMC remain mashed together because they are what is left of last year's Big Idea to combine Buick, Pontiac and GMC together into a Sales Channel. This kind of deck chair shuffling is a big part of what is wrong with so many modern corporations. The so called leaders spout off all kinds of buzz word filled hoo-ha while rarely actually getting busy and doing the work that matters. I doubt many of them can actually tell you what part of their job matters and what part is just a waste of time. I'll give the marketing execs their first hint: Product names really matter, and tapping into the residual goodwill from legendary names is an easy choice to make. Cadillac's present naming scheme is the sort of thing Power Point deck happy MBAs love, but it is a complete failure at arousing the desire of customers to buy the things. Imagine the person who has been buying a new Deville every five years forever. They come in for their latest one and discover that it has a silly three latter not-even-a-name now and is unloved by the very people selling them. Deville buyers don't want to be told that Cadillacs are now a great substitute for German cars!