About 4 years ago a former student who was at CU business school had a paper to write about what GM should do to become profitable in the future. My response was that they needed to re-think everything they do. In order to do that, I suggested doing what IBM did in the early 90's: Get a CEO from outside the industry who will not be tied to the old ways.
When the government took over GM, then had CEO Rick Waggoner fired earlier this year, a many people were upset that they should let this veteran leave, that they needed his experience to get out of their hole. What they needed is more of what they did yesterday, which was to dump their new CEO for being too tied to the old GM.
We are all stockholders in GM now, so we need to pay attention to what goes on there. Keeping guys with 25 or 30 years of leading GM into the crap company it became could hardly be a good idea. GM lacked imagination, vision, commitment to quality, engineering expertise, innovation......pretty much anything that makes a company successful. They were good at putting cupholders in their crap cars. And I guess ONStar is a good idea.
GM has tried to survive by fighting progress and the idea of competition. Getting rid of it's old baggage is a good start. Notre Dame would have had a better excuse for keeping Charlie Weis.
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