For years, I’ve been trying to convince one of our GM moles to provide some anonymous insight into the boiler room of the Titanic. This is my most recent reply, reprinted with permission. “Its not that I am no longer interested in at least giving it a whirl– Robert I gotta be honest with you, the position I hold within the Corporation as well as the UAW would almost spell doom for me personally if I would ever post under my actual name… Given all that’s going on right now, its not uncommon for me to take work home and plug away a 18 hr. day. Some on the site that I believe work for GM are refering to high stress/bunker like mentality and I can attest to this. Watching grown men cry that have always behaved somewhat professinally is discomforting at best. I personally hope this is not the end as my march toward insolvency would only be preceded by GM itself. I’m not wealthy nor sheltered by past savings or 401k. And I sure as hell would have a hard time explaining that I’ve spent the last 5 years as a XXXX for the UAW. Gotta think that my choice in this matter would sink my resume quicker than a manhole cover in water… My personal daily feelings are as follows when at work: one part fucked-up chapter of McBeth read in pig-latin; one part daily interaction with people that look and act the part of droogs in Clockwork Orange. And all the while the Doors “The End” playing in the background.”
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“I’ve suffered the tortures of the damned, sir – tortures of the damned.”
I’m sure this person is working hard at GM. However, I have several friends that work at GM, both in the RenCen and the Warren Tech Center. The reports I’ve received indicate fear, but this fear has not resulted in people working harder and/or smarter. Certainly, a few are putting in those 18 hour days, but, if the parking lot at the Warren Tech Center is any indicatation, most are not.
RF – I think you’re blowing the door wide open on the most critical part of any turnaround plan – a complete spiritual cleansing of corporate culture. Muddled in group-think, individual cram-down and position jockeying completely stifles innovation, efficiency, and progress.
It’s happened/happening at Ford, and results follow. Bill Ford is a visionary, but he lacks the discipline to execute. Furthermore, because he was family – nobody was willing to stick their neck out to paint a realistic picture of what was tearing the company apart from the inside out. Thankfully, Bill was cognizant enough to realize his shortcomings, and stepped aside. Mullaly arrived, and started kicking ass and taking names. The execu-exodus that happened after his arrival was because Detroit Bubble thinking was no longer allowed. Those who refused to be un-brainwashed were shown the door. The process is not pretty or rosy, but necessary. Ford will emerge as a result a stronger, leaner, and internally healthier company (if they can make it through this storm).
Unless GM is exorcised of this horrid mentality (and the solution is NOT axing more heads – just the heads that promote this culture), any product, business, or profitability plan will never be successful. The group-think, inbred, cut-throat hell led by Grosse Pointe Myopia will doom them more inevitably than any financial crisis. Wagoner’s no idiot, the guy could turn a company – in theory. But he too, riddled by 30 years of living in the Detroit Bubble, knows no other way of doing business other than rule by iron fist and executive grooming based not on performance of results but by performance in conformity.
I’ve done time on the inside of these companies. It’s terrible, stifling, and a horrible place to grow a career unless you’ve been brainwashed into that way of thinking. I have friends that remain there (by some stroke of luck/fate/stupidity), and their tales (and your “moles”) support my claims.
Unfortunately, this is something no Oversight Board will ever be able to grasp or control.
I hope this guy has his resume out.
Corporate culture is incredibly difficult to change. I’m glad to hear Ford is experiencing progress, but remember that we’ve heard all this before. Recall the agonizing reappraisal of the 1980s, when each of the Big Three allegedly “reinvented” themselves to better compete with the imports? The old cultures eventually came back to haunt.
I don’t understand why anyone would recommend the merger of GM and Chrysler, because that would throw two terribly dysfunctional cultures together. We should be going in the opposite direction. For example, GM’s American operations could benefit from being broken into two pieces.
If GM is “too big to fail” then the price of a bailout should be breaking up the company so that is never the case again.
I have salaried friends at Honda, Hyundai, Nissan and other companies that work 12-hour days, 6 and 7 days a week. When times are good. When sales are up. When they are fully staffed. Not when they are asked to but when they feel the job requires it. Welcome to being in the car business in the 21st century-you got to work harder and smarter if you want to win.
There are many great people at GM who are doing their very best to build better vehicles, but there’s simply not enough of them to go around right now, or they’re not high enough up on the org chart to affect decisions yet. As the domestic Big-3 cut heads they will lose even more of these brilliant, hard working people who will leave our industry-many of them are currently seeking defense jobs for obvious reasons. These kind of people have seen the handwriting on the wall a long time ago but they stubbornly believe that they can make a difference and believe in their hearts that GM can return to greatness, and it can-just not with current management and current culture. If GM wants to survive, they should seek out these GM hard working believers, promote them , remove the deadwood and start recruiting talent from the Transplants that understand that sometimes, an 18-hour day is the norm, not the exception.
Here is my knowledge of these so-called “18-hour days” based on direct information from GM people:
~ 20% of the time is spent on the product, on the true auto job as outsiders see it. In fact, GM surveys prove this meager morsel of time.
~ 20% of the time is dealing with GM’s amazing, convoluted, inefficient systems, and procedures, amazingly still there here, alive, well, thriving, at the end of 2008. Putrid to use. Wasteful. Indefensible, but mandated to use.
~ 20% of the time is dealing with your bosses kiss-ass initiatives to make him/her look good to next boss, for his/her benefit, not the product. Still alive this month! And by the way, there’s still a good 20+ levels of management.
~ 20% of the time is answering email from the people asking information from you, dealing with the above scenarios themselves.
~ 20% of the time is mental health time. Therapy. Chatting, talking with trusted coworkers, about the idiocy of the business life we live, and the culture of fear inside GM, as alive as ever, has that prevents us from doing what we want to do, which is to really get the job done.
With regard to puking in toilets (on company time), trembling fear, quivering lips…, well, let ’em, and who cares. It’s called: Wake-up Time. It’s called, GM leaders misled you. Those employees not knowing the true state of the company, available via various external media for the last 20 years, are the blindest of them all.
GM is a company of very skilled people, misused by their idiot mangement.
I was at the Warren tech center yesterday for two meetings and had lunch with some of the GM guys when Wagoner was talking.
They are all very concerned, obviously, but they are also doing their very best to maintain their commitment to their job at hand.
And in spite of what some have said, there are a lot of directors at GM who are highly respected and very competent leaders. I just finished a conference call with a director who, along with several other directors and executive directors are working with my company to enable their global engineering community to considerably enhance their capabilities for concurrent development. The plans are in place, we have completed the first and biggest step and they will realize these enhancements beginning early next year. It took a lot of planning and working together with the directors and a frankly brilliant and committed group of people within various areas of GM to outline their processes and determine how to implement, streamline and standardize them on a global basis. The benefits of this are substantial and this is not the only project of its kind that have either already been implemented and/or are in process.
There is indeed light at the end of the tunnel and no, it is not a train heading right at them.
I have worked with GM in various capacities for over thirty years and the pace of change over the last two to three years is simply amazing.
The problem is that the company is so large, with so many global entities that it is not a simple ‘make it so number 1’ to enable these changes all at once – but they are on a definite and game changing path of fixing the inefficiencies that were generated based upon a 100 year old company that has gone global on a large scale over the last decade or so. The people I work with do ‘get it’ and are driving these changes with spectacular results – not very visible outside of the company yet, but the results will be evident in the very near term.
I appreciate anyone that shines light on corruption. GM gave up any right to corporate secrets when it came to Washington with the begging cup.
However, this guy sounds like a salaried worker at GM (18 hour days, bringing work home), yet he has a position in the UAW!
That sounds like a major conflict of interest.
Perhaps this is how GM ended up with a Job Bank where GM gets punished for developing technology that increases the efficiency and quality of production. From the TTAC Job Bank post, this is a provision of the UAW Job Bank: “employees can not be laid off because of new technology.”
Punishing companies for improving technology is how companies and countries are destroyed.
“Putting in 12/18 hour days” seems like a great deal. However I have seen those people wait for details/info that they need until they complete their work. It sometimes takes 12 hours with 6/8 hours of waiting. I have also seen people moving about looking like they have important work to do when in fact they do little or nothing all day. Others spend all day in meetings only to come back to their desks to actually do some work.
My point “putting in” is not the same as breaking rocks for 12/18 hours. I’m sure some do work that hard but many don’t.
All I’ve read here is consistent with my experiences. The Full-Size Truck engineering team executed brilliantly when I was there, and that’s just one example.
But unfortunately, all parts of the machine must be effective or else everyone will end up in the same place. Massive dynamic change is necessary. I’m listening to the hearings on the XM C-SPAN feed and it is obvious that GM leadership is not yet ready to do what needs to be done. The government even less so–they know precious little other than how to steal from their subjects.
I need to see Clockwork Orange sometime…
Actually, you need to see “A Clockwork Orange”.
Farago must have just bought the Kubrick collection. We had Dr. Strangelove a couple days ago and now A Clockwork Orange.
In my opinion Full Metal Jacket is a better analogy for life within GM.
Sure, some of the upper management is a bit fringe, like Sergeant Hartman, but generally it’s a regular group of people fighting a war they cannot possibly win.
The un-winnable war for GM is the war to run a profitable automobile company under the constraints of insane UAW contracts and state franchise laws that make it impossible to kill redundant, cannibalistic brands and dealers. Not to mention the $50 billion in debt that GM has accumulated due to those UAW and dealership liabilities.
GM’s past management allowed the insane UAW contracts, and was asleep at the wheel while the dealers bought-off their state legislators, but now for GM to have a viable future it needs Chapter 11, not analysis of how its internal structure works.
Soichiro Honda could not save a company with the $50 billion in debt, oppressive UAW contracts and 8 redundant, infighting, cannibalistic brands with 7500 competing-against-eachother dealers that GM has.
@anoldbikeguy : I do hope you’re right. I know there are some brilliant, talented people in GM, but so many are squashed by the bad apples – of which there are staggering amounts of. Worse yet, FUD will eliminate the genuine in favor of the manipulative, so it’s easy for these factions to run rampant.
Fantastic movie. Entertaining, provocative, and engaging with a razor edge so sharp it takes a few days to process what you just saw.
But it’s not a horror flick. That’d be more appropriate for the auto industry right now. You know, working massive overtime while sales crater month after month so your effort results in – what, exactly?
“chapter of McBeth [sic] read in pig-latin; one part daily interaction with people that look and act the part of droogs in Clockwork Orange. And all the while the Doors ‘The End’ playing in the background.”
Wow.
The Brown Acid is bad, people.
no_slushbox, that’s a load of nonsense. If GM was selling the cars/trucks Honda sells today, with their oppressive contracts and awful dealers, they’d MAYBE be losing a little money, but they wouldn’t be about to go belly-up. You again ignore the difference between selling a Civic for $18-20K and a Cobalt for $12K – the Cobalt may have ‘saved’ you a grand or two on crappier parts, but you lost a lot more revenue in the process.
In general, I concur with jgh, anoldbikeguy and IOthworldaliving….In regards to the Tech Center staff, who I interface with several times a week, the changes in management, structure and decision-making swiftness has drastically improved over the last 3-4 years. It’s hard to put into words, but current anxiety and jitters aside, there is a palatable, almost youthful can-do sense about the Tech Center today.
I’ve read what it was like “in the bunker” at Packard during the last days of their Detroit operations in the summer of 1956, before I was born.
This sounds much the same, only bigger.
I’ve also read what it was like for Borgward in 1960 (Germany), 4th largest auto concern in 1958-1959, to have the rug yanked from under them by the Stadt of Bremen. Borgward had routinely obtained “bridge loans” from the state and were refused. When it was realized that the company would be forced into bankruptcy by the state, a visitor from Studebaker-Packard Corporation was there and wrote about what he saw; grown men crying.
Again, this sounds much the same, only bigger.
Interestingly, Borgward was not in fact found to be insolvent when all was done, but the company was wound up anyway, and Herr Borgward died, presumably from a broken heart.
It was said that Daimler-Benz had “friends” in governmental high places who saw to it that Borgward’s new big “Grosser Limousine” (competitor to the finback Mercedes) would not trouble them, and so it was.
Like a Phoenix, the big Borgward returned to life in Mexico in 1968, and was built until about 1971; and once again, like a Phoenix, the Borgward “six” came back to life and was used by AMC in Mexico for a short while in the 1980’s.
Well I got 10 maybe 12 days to go.In Oshawa we just lost 3rd shift for the Impala,another 700 jobs!The truck plant is gone in May and the flex/Camaro plant will start running soon?Other than the Camaro NO more product till 2011?
Motorcity of Canada in a word is “fucked”
Menno,
Do you think Borgward and the employees died believing in the benefits of socialism?