In order for a company to survive in the business world today, they must be innovate and accepting to change. As soon as a company becomes complacent in the way they do things, the quality in goods they produce, or even what market segments they compete in – they’ve already begun their inevitable decline. GM used to be the most recognizable brand in the Automobile industry. For 77 consecutive years from 1931-2007, GM was the leader in global automobile sales. However, before we knew what happened, GM filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and was forced to shed several brands, including Saturn, Pontiac and Hummer. Many attribute GMs fall from grace to lack of quality, creativity and a furciferous waste of capital. The article by Daniel Roth claims that “only an outsider could deliver the change GM needed to survive” (Roth 2015).
As CEO of General Motors, I would absolutely ruffle some feathers upon my arrival. In 2009, Steven Rattner was appointed in overseeing the government-funded rebuilding of General Motors, and he went on to claim that he had never seen anything like what he saw in Detroit, Michigan. He was quoted as saying “GM had arguably the worst culture of any major company I’ve ever been around” (Roth 2015). Rattner went on to cite that within GM, there was a pernicious tendency to never, under any circumstances, admit or acknowledge failure. This would be one of the first things I would change. Failure is often times an indicator of effort and should seldom be a punishable event. If you don’t succeed, try and try again. Often times we stumble upon other inventions, innovations, theories or philosophies simply by being wrong about the initial problem we were trying to tackle or address.
Rattner also goes on to say that “Gm had a tendency to manage by power point rather than through real leadership” and that employees would nod at a decision and then go on to