4LT GS RoadsterAmong the troubles with General Motors Co. getting four new CEOs in less than two years is that one of the first casualties is stability.
Top management keeps changing, the vision for the company changes. Leading executives say they think they're on the same page as the new boss, but admit when pressed that they really aren't all that sure. For a company finally making real money again because it's making credible cars and trucks again, that's not so good.
Or encouraging — for employees and customers, shareholders and would-be investors.
Last week, CEO Dan Akerson bounced one of the last Old GM hands, car guy Tom Stephens, up to chief technology officer and bestowed the all-important global product development job on Mary Barra. She's the 49-year-old rising star now running GM's global human resources operation after stints as vice president of manufacturing engineering, plant manager and assistant (aka "bagman") for retired Chairman Jack Smith.
High-profile jobs, yes. But the makings of the major domo for a global car and truck maker — the most important job in a car company, an executive at a GM rival said — whose core products must be world-class and so do its advanced technology vehicles?
Let's hope so and let's hope she gets the time to prove it. Because if GM loses the product momentum that carried it into bankruptcy and now is driving it out, the taxpayer-financed bailout will morph from a developing success story into a tale of outsiders who didn't really understand that more than a few people from the Old GM know what they're doing.
If they don't, how could there be a renaissance of Cadillac? The strengthening Buick lineup? What about the better designs, continuing momentum in China, a credible Chevrolet and the extended-range electric Volt that Akerson wants to build in larger volume?
All of it may not be best-in-the-business, but most of it is far better than the automaker's done in decades and it didn't get that way by accident. It came from an iterative product development process whose leaders earned and conferred respect in more or less equal measure — a sharp departure from GM's finance- and marketing-led disasters of the '80s, '90s and early part of the '00s.
Could Akerson's moves signal a little GM déjà vu all over again? There's the new imperative to extract more cost from the product at the risk of cheapening it, the push to market cars and trucks as just another consumer product, the tendency to impose business (and political?) goals on engineering instead of appreciating that engineering can limit business decisions, at least in the short term.
Sound familiar?
The art of managing the turnaround of a large, technically driven enterprise demands leaders who can distinguish between necessary change and change for the sake of change. Leadership by musical chairs doesn't help.
"The company has been settled down," says Selim Bingol, GM's chief spokesman. "What you see is Dan making one move within the … existing senior management team."
It's no secret in this town that Ford Motor Co. is the global industry's success story. It's also no secret that Ford appeared headed for the tank ahead of GM a few years back and that it would have ended up there, too, but for wresting $23 billion from the capital markets and landing Boeing Co.'s Alan Mulally as CEO before the fall.
The point here isn't to lionize Mulally because, Lord knows, he gets enough praise. It's that the success of Ford, likely to post net income of some $8 billion for 2010 at the end of this week, is linked to the leader's decision to stabilize the organization, assess and promote its indigenous talent and lead it in a clear, unambiguous direction.
At GM? Not so much — at least not so far — and my guess is that the folks inside know it.
DNAI
Top management keeps changing, the vision for the company changes. Leading executives say they think they're on the same page as the new boss, but admit when pressed that they really aren't all that sure. For a company finally making real money again because it's making credible cars and trucks again, that's not so good.
Or encouraging — for employees and customers, shareholders and would-be investors.
Last week, CEO Dan Akerson bounced one of the last Old GM hands, car guy Tom Stephens, up to chief technology officer and bestowed the all-important global product development job on Mary Barra. She's the 49-year-old rising star now running GM's global human resources operation after stints as vice president of manufacturing engineering, plant manager and assistant (aka "bagman") for retired Chairman Jack Smith.
High-profile jobs, yes. But the makings of the major domo for a global car and truck maker — the most important job in a car company, an executive at a GM rival said — whose core products must be world-class and so do its advanced technology vehicles?
Let's hope so and let's hope she gets the time to prove it. Because if GM loses the product momentum that carried it into bankruptcy and now is driving it out, the taxpayer-financed bailout will morph from a developing success story into a tale of outsiders who didn't really understand that more than a few people from the Old GM know what they're doing.
If they don't, how could there be a renaissance of Cadillac? The strengthening Buick lineup? What about the better designs, continuing momentum in China, a credible Chevrolet and the extended-range electric Volt that Akerson wants to build in larger volume?
All of it may not be best-in-the-business, but most of it is far better than the automaker's done in decades and it didn't get that way by accident. It came from an iterative product development process whose leaders earned and conferred respect in more or less equal measure — a sharp departure from GM's finance- and marketing-led disasters of the '80s, '90s and early part of the '00s.
Could Akerson's moves signal a little GM déjà vu all over again? There's the new imperative to extract more cost from the product at the risk of cheapening it, the push to market cars and trucks as just another consumer product, the tendency to impose business (and political?) goals on engineering instead of appreciating that engineering can limit business decisions, at least in the short term.
Sound familiar?
The art of managing the turnaround of a large, technically driven enterprise demands leaders who can distinguish between necessary change and change for the sake of change. Leadership by musical chairs doesn't help.
"The company has been settled down," says Selim Bingol, GM's chief spokesman. "What you see is Dan making one move within the … existing senior management team."
It's no secret in this town that Ford Motor Co. is the global industry's success story. It's also no secret that Ford appeared headed for the tank ahead of GM a few years back and that it would have ended up there, too, but for wresting $23 billion from the capital markets and landing Boeing Co.'s Alan Mulally as CEO before the fall.
The point here isn't to lionize Mulally because, Lord knows, he gets enough praise. It's that the success of Ford, likely to post net income of some $8 billion for 2010 at the end of this week, is linked to the leader's decision to stabilize the organization, assess and promote its indigenous talent and lead it in a clear, unambiguous direction.
At GM? Not so much — at least not so far — and my guess is that the folks inside know it.
DNAI
