Automotive News [sub] is reporting that GM managers are worried enough about their chances for a bailout to write up a “Plan B” in case the funds don’t come through. Of course this plan has nothing to do with restructuring, returning to profitability, or facing reality, it’s simply a plan to “keep the company running until President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.” At which point… um… nope, it doesn’t say anything. Nationalization? Chapter 11? The Rapture? Who freaking knows. Anyway, the “Plan B” is pretty much a bunch more of the same, as it calls for GM to delay payments to suppliers, slash white-collar jobs and salaries and gut its marketing campaigns. So, y’know, the usual, only a little worse. AN even suggests that “the cuts could even seep into r&d — the vital core activity crucial to GM’s long-term success.” Which is how necrosis works. One minute you’re cutting off toes and telling yourself things will be fine. Before you know it, you’re out of limbs to sever and the stuff is up to your neck. If (more) R&D goes on hold, GM will have no future to fight for. And if suppliers start demanding payment on delivery? Game over. Sources are saying GM will make “a massive communication to the world” of its plans after Thanksgiving.
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Sounds like GM’s approach to quality-to incrementally try to determine what the absolute minimum they need to do to (in theory) “satify the customer”.
Bunter
If Wagoner is actually stupid enough to keep on with the same things he’s been doing after being told he’s not going to get a bailout from the government, we’ll know several things:
1. Wagoner doesn’t care about anybody in this mess but himself and his own reputation.
2. He thinks that he can fix GM by doing the same things that haven’t worked in the past.
3. He wants to be the “man that saves GM”, and thinks that this time will be different and his inane schemes will finally work.
4. He is not only an incompetent and a nincompoop, but incapable of admitting defeat, incapable of turning over his job to a competent official, incapable of doing what is best for his workers, and incapable of doing what is best for his country.
Wagoner expects America to bankroll his incapable hands via Obama and the Democrats. He is a menace to our country.
Shouldn’t this be a picture of the black knight? Completely in denial of his inability to fight? WOuld go well with the last few sentences too!
Wagoner is a disaster to GM and to our country. Under his leadership GM shares have lost almost 95% of their value and he is still in charge. How incompetent are the BOD supporting him. He and his Board need to be brought up on some kind of criminal charges for excessive corruption, incompetence and greed. He has personally done more damage to detroit and to american industrial power than any other person I can think of. Well, GW is right up there with him.
Nice reference.
Would this make Japan’s Big Three (more deserving of the title, “big”)and sometime Hyundai the little white rabbit that murdered nearly everyone that underestimated it?
1996MEdition: +1
Wagoner is a disaster to GM and to our country
To be fair to Rick, so were both his predecessors and many of his foreign and all of domestic competitors. Of course, just because everyone else is mediocre, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try for excellence.
Any “Plan B” would be a milestone for GM. Under Wagoner the company has never gone that far into the alphabet in its strategic planning. The General only just recently stumbled onto the idea of getting a “Plan A.”
Plan B? Ha! It is just going to be an accelerated version of the turnaround plan that GM has been using ever since shit hit the fan back in 2006:
1. Cut costs and release the Volt.
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
In some ways you can’t blame Rick Wagoner. He is a product of the broken system that he now knows nothing but to embrace, to the end.
He also is the only lifer amongst the three stooges. The guy was a schlep in the accounting department for years and years at GM; I don’t think he’s ever had another job since his Harvard days.
Wagoner’s a fossil from a different age when the best career opportunities for blue-bloods like him was to be a corporate tool at US Steel or GM, and work your way up the ladder in the century-old boardroom ass-play born in places like the aforementioned US Steel or Standard Oil, something like that. The cultural disconnect between that guy and Reality World where we live is pretty incredible.
Gettelfinger is just as out of touch. Chump thinks he’s in the world of Jimmy Hoffa or Samuel Gompers. He doesn’t realize how the world has changed. In the old days, when unions were born, it was to fight eighty hour work weeks and dying of black lung at age 30. Now, the union fights to insure there is forty hours of work at all for its employees, and if anything looks unsafe, you call OSHA and then get some shark-shyster like John Edwards on the phone and try your hand at some jackpot justice.
The world changed on these clowns and its going to destroy a system that is no longer compatible with it. Wagoner and Gettelfinger both are the saps who have to eat it, but if it wasn’t them, it would have been some equally inscrutably incompetent analogs because a broken system only produces broken leaders and solutions. Wagoner and Gettelfinger both are an effect, not a cause, of that broken system, which FINALLY might die. Put the bullet in the philly already, I wanna a new race to start.
A Black Friday indeed.
I have heard through my contacts in the car business that there is actually a plan C as well.
1. Bend over as far as you can.
2. Put your head as far between your legs as possible
3. You don’t really need to know step 3 do you?
Memo to GM…or anyone at GM who has any sense.
My advice for you today, tomorrow and for the next week or so is to Shut the F@#k Up…I would think that after last week’s ass-kicking by Congress and the general devil-may-care-if-you-die attitude exhibited not only by the MSM, but also by the business media would tell you that No One Is Buying What You Are Saying….so Shut Up, make your plans, and try your level best to sneak back into Washington under the cover of darkness, ask your few friends in Congress to move the ‘new’ hearings to a room with no electrical outlets or something-ANYTHING to keep your sorry asses OFF the danged TV screens this time and then maybe this time you won’t look so damned inept-I said LOOK…you’re still inept but you don’t have to look it. Maybe, just maybe you and your few Congressional allies can come away from an un-televised meeting and ‘spin’ the results just enough to keep 70% of Congress from being way to afraid to be seen shaking your hand. Such is the sorry state you folks find yourselves in-you employ 8-10X as many people as any Wall Street enterprise, you may even indirectly employ 1-out-of-14 jobs in the U.S.A. and yet you can’t get no lovin’ on Capitol Hill…Guys, just shut-up, lay low and maybe you will get what you want. Maybe.
Such is the sorry state you folks find yourselves in-you employ 8-10X as many people as any Wall Street enterprise
GM employees 266K workers, or thereabouts.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/17/business/auto.php
S**tibank, I mean Citibank, “employs” 352K, though they “plan” to cut this to 300K.
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/11/citigroup-about-50000-job-cuts-in-near.html
Never underestimate the ability of Wall Street to spend money without making money.
I agree with the general STFU recommendation.
What happens if their stiffed suppliers pull them into involuntary bankruptcy?
BTW, what was Plan A?
Quote: ttiley-” Such is the sorry state you folks find yourselves in-you employ 8-10X as many people as any Wall Street enterprise
GM employees 266K workers, or thereabouts.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/17/business/auto.php
S**tibank, I mean Citibank, “employs” 352K, though they “plan” to cut this to 300K.”-ttiley
Ooop, I had a Senior Moment there…I was thinking about the Domestic Auto Industry employment figures inclusive of suppliers, raw materials as a whole and this article is about GM only. ttiley is right and I was wrong. Sh#tibank does employ more people currently.
Hey Fed, if Citibank was guaranteed $326Billion in loans and debt relief and they have 352,000 employees that works out to about $93,000 per employee. So if you follow you oh-so-fair level-headed way of doling out your ‘help’ to preserve the economy, then if you multiply that same $93,000 per employee by the 266,000 GM employees you arrive at a number somewhere around $247Billion for GM alone…That’s only fair right? Not.
Robert Schwartz:
I told you already:
1. Cut costs and release the Volt.
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
That has ALWAYS been their game plan. Thus why they are begging the government for money.