Monday, June 01, 2009

This Is The End , Of Old GM The End ...

Is This GM's Newest Model ? My Heart Will Go On.........

If you look hard enough, you will find ironies all over the place in this world. They are everywhere..Today's irony? The day after the last Titanic survivor passed away, GM - the Titanic of Bad Management - goes down as well.....Now comes your worst nightmare - you are now a 60% owner of a company that blew through $50 Billion in cash in the past year. Your cash...

We've been joking about what GM now stands for since the government has taken it over. Here are our top suggestions:

Gigantic Mistake

Government Manipulation

Godawful Mess

We all know that this is the day that was 30 years in the making. In 1979, GM had a workforce of 600,000 employees, when japan really started to make inroads towards their market share. Now GM will have only 60,000 employees. Somewhere along the line, GM became this disgustingly inefficient and bloated behemoth. When you have to sell 16,000,000 of those $20,000 vehicles just to BREAK EVEN, you have fixed cost issues. They still do. They still spend way too much to the unions, and their cars are a bit plasticky and crappy. But their not THAT bad. They can turn it around if they really try....

But there is one big problem. The most inefficient enterprise ever invented now owns 60% of GM. Yes, politicians run GM, or at least hold their purse strings. GM has just made a deal with Satan... Right now, The Obama Administration is saying all the right things: this is temporary, this isn't what we wanted to do,we're going to find a buyer for GM. But I don't trust anyone in DC when it comes to running a business.

Take the first step as an example. Guess who Obama's point man for the whole GM takeover has been? Brian Deese. No, I didn't know who he was either. For starters, he's 31. But he's an up and coming guy in the auto business, right? Wrong. He's a political hack who has never spent A DAY in the biz. This is the equivalent of making one of my customers the General Manager at my dealership because he/she owns a car. I'm all for 'out of the box' thinking, but not literally out of the box. This is business, and the political consequences of business have no place in this. The whole GM Bankruptcy wreaks of politics...Here's an article on Deese..

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/01deese.html

Is the the beginning of a new, smaller, leaner and meaner GM? We sure hope so. Of course, it could be just the beginning of the end....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmxyj6iInMc

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If GM survives Obama most likely will emerge looking like a financial genius plus the unions will support him in 2012. If it fails,it would be the economic thud of election and make Carter look like Warren Buffet. A GM failure would, in all likelyhood, deal a severe blow to the economy,and most likely bring an recovery to a very slow crawl. Not to mention the billions we will have wasted. GM was allowed to get to big;it mere financial size and impact on the US economy created a liability no one could have considered....teg

Bobby said...

Getta Mechanic