Times have now moved on, as they have a way of doing, but Fritz Henderson, the new CEO, whose resume looks tailor-made for the job, appears to have been hypnotized by the environment on GM's top executive redoubt (which used to be on the 14th floor, well insulated from the rest of the company), into making yet another public statement that he will probably live to regret. He said, and I am quoting from the Times, "a new product-oriented culture has been put in place," and that GM's new board was "pushing management to speed up decisions on new products" and best of all, planning to "install a culture devoted to pleasing customers."
I love that last part. I can see Fritz or one of his many assistants going to the web and googling "install a new culture" as if it were an off-the-shelf item that, if the price was right and one was in stock, could be shipped by express, so as to ensure that the new culture was pleasing customers starting on the very next Monday mornng. My faithful readers -- both of them -- may know that changing the culture of large organizations is not a task to be undertaken lightly, since it has a solid history of failure. And come to think of it, what do we imagine GM was doing in the last decade or so -- fiddling while the company burned?
But, I hear you say, maybe this time they've learned their lessons and they'll really get down to it. But I say, Maybe Not. This is all too likely to be the next in a series of brilliant illustrations of executive intelligence, such as dissing the hybrids until long after they were successful, dissing the unions after sweet-talking them for 40 years (remember Tarrytown, anyone?) and dissing shareholders, who watched in horror as the company slid down the chute into bankruptcy. But, you say, they're much smaller and more nimble now; they "only" have 280,000 employees instead of 540,000 (in 1955). Well, then, I guess that's alright. Ha!
Ditto that! Instead of culture install, how about lighting up a collegial network that electrifies and activates the innovation mindedness that's already there, scattered, beaten down, but ready to roar once more. Let's create a social network within GM that's pro-innovation. Empower them to be an ubergroup that's distributed rather than stealth-labbed and boxed-in the way the Stealth Bomber dev team was. Most of all, let's not manage them. Not one bit. And let's reward this tiger team. Give them a $5 million dollar problem to solve in parallel with the official team. If they win, they win the $5 million minus whatever the official team spent up til that point. Speed is king...for both teams. Standards are there for all to see. How much you want to bet the tiger team beats the official, committee-laden, top down, bottlenecked gang every time? Aligned creativity gives birth. Bottom-line, quarterly-focused management squeezes the life out of cash cows and golden geese. Just ask the folks at the hippest music and television networks how the wheels fell off when profit-taking became king. ROI became the weapon of choice used by one C-Suiter to kill the early babies of a rival. Because you can kill ANY idea in its infancy if you demand ROI. The love leaves the house.
ReplyDelete-- eggdawg
It's all old hat. Over the last 20 years GM's top management has been consistent in its "cultural priorities" - and in its failures. They have regularly said that they were going to "act as one company, stretch, have a sense of urgency and remain product and service focused"; to "rejuvenate" the company; to have "turmoil and change" in order to "stir up the world's most monolithic corporate bureaucracy, and challenge the timid, conformist thinking that dominates so much of its decision making, especially on product development". They would give "GM managers a better instinctive feel for their customers" (a phrase that is surely right up there with "installing a new culture"). Their "leadership army" was to "cascade this cultural philosophy throughout the entire company worldwide". And this was going to work because "when the leaders lead and the team implements, success is certain".
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Henderson must have read this blog and its two comments. Then decided to leave.
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