Organization and Management – Assignment 1
I.

Information
General Motors (GM) was one of the market leaders in automobile production prior to the 1980s and 1990s. Under the supervision of Alfred
P. Sloan Jr., GM developed 5 independent divisions that marketed their own line of cars. These divisions – Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac – catered to different economic price ranges.
This
organizational design led to GM being the world’s largest manufacturing organization during the post-World War II era.
However, during the 1980s, GM experienced its first loss since 1921. The newly appointed CEO Roger Smith began redesigning GM’s organizational structure to push decision making down to the operational level instead of the management level. He created two different groups, the BOC – composed of the Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac divisions, and the CPC – from the Chevrolet, Pontiac and GM of Canada. Each group had complete authority to organize whichever way they wanted and to do what was necessary to bring GM back into a good economic status.
The BOC group organized four independent strategic business units, which was reminiscent of the previous organizational structure of GM. The CPC group on the other hand, moved towards the traditional centralized organizational structure.
Upon the appointment of Jack Smith as CEO of GM in 1993, he carried out what would seem as harsh measures for GM. He eliminated a lot of staff by combining different departments and paring down to a single operating division. The previous traditional divisions became different marketing units, but the production, design and purchasing was performed by a single different unit. The reorganization efforts of GM continue as the company still continues to lose profitability.

II.

Author’s Point of View
The author focuses on the different organizational