OK, I missed this one: an Automotive News [sub] Op-Ed by Mike Jackson, GM’s former marketing and advertising Veep [thanks for the heads-up, Frank]. In his piece, Jackson rips Government Motors a new one. Well, not exactly. ‘Cause excoriating GM for past mistakes would require Jackson to admit his own role in the debacle. Jackson can’t do that. That would be too much like taking the same sort of personal accountability for which the ex-exec now calls. Less enigmatically, Jackson’s rant tells GM what it should do, you know, now that he’s got the hell out of town. First up: culture. “Streamline the organization structure. Get rid of the cancerous GM lifers. The new GM must be nimble and evoke emotion and passion. Have the leaders of the divisional brand teams report directly to the office of the CEO, rather than through four layers as they have done.” More? Of course there’s more.
Accountability: “Hold sales and marketing leaders accountable for revenue and profit performance.” Rad! Don’t stop now! “Challenge American consumers by being inclusive and give them the cars and trucks that they want.” Whoa! Dude! Gopher it!
Treat dealers, ad agencies, media companies and suppliers as partners, not vendors. The days of big, bad GM and the old our-way-or-the-highway attitude are over. The new GM must value and leverage its partners or replace them with partners who embody the new culture.
Are they over? Really? Where’s the proof? Good sign: GM’s autocratic, penny-pinching group vice president, Global Purchasing and Supply Chain Bo I. Andersson has left GM to “pursue other career opportunities.” Bad sign: no one at a similar level of management has joined him. (Yet.)
Anyway, Ad Age wanted to know more. So they had a post-rant chinwag with Mike Jackson to get the real deal. And . . . the gloves are off!
Mr. Jackson, now a partner in digital agency SarkissianMason, New York, said the automaker’s U.S. operations have too many layers for approval of ads. Work on major launches begins with the divisional ad manager, and ads for crucial models must move all the way up to top management for approval. It wasn’t unusual, he said, for 15 or 20 people to present the work in meetings.
He dubbed GM as a “PowerPoint culture” and a “bureaucracy of meetings culture.” During his tenure at the automaker, Mr. Jackson said that “there were no meetings where people just sat down, had a discussion and made a decision.”
None? Even discounting hyperbole, that’s scary.
Sounds like a big government agency. They should fit right in with the colonial government masters.
No wonder my two shares went from $735 (current $) in ’65 to nothing today. That nice LDSer I knew back then, who was trying to get everyone to buy Fords because he has Ford stock: at least he has something. (If he didn’t sell it years ago.)
One word: gobbledygook. He’ll fit right in.
State the obvious and look like an expert. Just like Dr. Phil.
“Challenge American consumers by being inclusive and give them cars and trucks that they want”? WTF?
What would have been wrong with just saying, “give American consumers the cars and trucks that they want”? Oh, I know. Anybody could have said that. The mark of a corporate communications professional is found in his ability to spew arcane-sounding argle-bargle like “challenge the consumer” and “be inclusive.” Jackson’s comments are more a shining example of the kind of bureaucratic non-thinking that got GM to its present state than an indictment of it.
I’m surprised he didn’t mention the urgent need to think outside the box in order to leverage GM’s core competencies and achieve a paradigm shift through the application of a best of breed approach to sourcing and policy-implementation. Maybe that would have been pushing the envelope.
TO: M. J.
RE: GM Culture, i.e. Dysfuntional
Date: 06/14/2009
Sir: See Memo dated 1978.
Sincerely,
E. J.
CC: B.O.
GM has been challenging their consumers for 40+ years. What they should be doing is serving their customers instead.
Cicero is right. This guy is just spewing corporatespeak while not owning up to his own failure.
–chuck
Is it wrong that I looked at the name in the headline and thought it was about the Thriller guy?
Cicero – don’t forget to synergize! (twice a day for best results)
it is possible to say what’s on your mind AFTER you’ve left an organization – say while on board and you get the axe. He’s certainly in a position to state what WAS going on inside the company. Maybe the “new” GM can learn from his experience.
He forgot to use the words “holistic approach” which have been the nonsensical pablum of choice spewed at our corporate meetings for the past couple years.
Your usual blanket criticism is misleading I believe. Jackson praises certain individuals for making very positive changes to the processes and culture within a certain part of GM and mourns their leaving and what he perceives as a return to what went on before these individuals arrived. Since he was not there prior to their arrival, he obviously had no role. I don’t know if his assessment is accurate, but, what he said is reasonable IMO.
So it took several meetings and layers of management to come up with “Youngsmobile”, “The most versatile HUMMER ever”, and “Pontiac is car”?
“Challenge American consumers by being inclusive and give them the cars and trucks that they want.”
WTF does that even mean? Are we to assume that old GM at some point in it’s history was intentionally exclusive in how it related to it’s customers?
Sales Manager: “I’m sorry, sir. We require men to wear jackets and ties when they enter the showroom floor. We have a jacket you could borrow, but, if I may so, You really don’t appear to be Oldsmobile material. We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
Customer: “But I brought a briefcase full of money and I’m willing to pay full MSRP. I even want the undercoating.”
Sales Manager: “Again, I’m terribly sorry, but there is a certain atmosphere that we are trying to develop, a sort of Oldsmobile philosophy, and you don’t fit that paradigm, standing there in your cheap shoes and your discount store pleather carryall. Please don’t make a scene, sir. I’d hate to have to call the police. I’m sure you’ll feel more comfortable at one of those Asian manufacturer’s dealerships.”
Jeez, it’s almost as if Mr. Jackson was admitting that there was an actual plan to drive away customers and push the company into bankruptcy.
An excellent critique, but not an original one. Hundreds of people inside GM are aware of these problems. But none of them feel they can fix them.
“Powerpoint culture” is especially apt. In my thesis I criticized the assumption that senior execs could make better decisions based on ten slides than the team which lived and breathed the vehicle.
http://www.truedelta.com/execsum.php
Maybe he should go back to playing basketball. Go number 23 ! Oh, wait- he’s too old. ;-] LOL
P.S.- that’s some fly bling shizizzle on them chains !
Lifers are a big problem in prisons so maybe he is on to something.
Maybe it’s the GM employees that have been given a life sentence that are making things hell on the fresh meat, so put all the lifers on the Aveo and see what happens..
What the hell, worst case is they will just need a few more billion…
That’s what they did. They pushed all the people looking for a good value out of the Olds showrooms, who went over to Asian showrooms, and emerged … shiny happy people. Meanwhile, the Olds showrooms turned threadbare and were shuttered. The End.
PowerPoint Culture?
I used to do computer support for DuPont. Back in the 1990s, when the Microsoft Office suite of applications became pretty much standard in business and industry, Microsoft promoted Word, Excel and PowerPoint as productivity tools. I remember a very smart person described them more accurately as activity generators. You appear to be busy and doing work, but you’re just prettifying your basic info.
To be sure, some PowerPoint can be a valuable teaching tool, like the late Capt. Travis Patriquin’s How To Win The War in Al-Anbar, which laid out what became the successful blueprint for turning the people of Al Anbar province in Iraq against Al Queda.
Have any of you ever played a game called “Buzzword Bingo”? It was really big in the late 90’s and early 00’s.
It was a blast! It’s just like Bingo, execpt that instead of numbers, you go into your meetings with cards having words like…
Synergy/Synergies
Metrics
Leverage
Inclusive
Empower
Quality
Gateway
Client/Server
Secure Sockets
Encryption
Flight Path or Glide Path
Focused Intensity
On Target
Launch (as in “product launch”)
…and so on. Whenever you heard one of the words or phrases on your card, you checked that off. The winner was the first one who got a full row, column, or diagonal filled up.
But to actually win, you were required to actually say the word “bingo” out loud in the meeting. The trick was to say it and “seem” like you were agreeing with the presenter or person who was speaking at that time. And to hope that the person speaking didn’t know (or care) about the game.
What fun! On one teleconference call, we had two people say “bingo” at the same time!