General motors corporation (GM) filed for chapter 11 bankcruptcy protection, the second-largest industrial bankruptcy in history (worldcom was the largest). GM, which hadn’t made aprofit since 2004, declare in its filing that it had 172 billion in debt and 82 billion in assets. As any competent business student could tell you. The ratio doesn’t make a balance sheet balance, especially when the companys equity is worth little.
Fritz Henderson, who named CEO of Gm on march 30,2009, was a numbers guy, but he knew the companys culture had to change. His vision of the new organizational culture revolved around four guidelines: risk taking, accountability, speed, and costumer-product focus. The problem was that GM had tried before to reinvent itself, with mixed success. “GM’s past is littered with the buzzords of culture change. It has struggled to impose cultural change across the highly bureaucratic company in which brands, departments, and regions operated like self governing and competing states within a federation. But GM’s executive said, this time would be different. After all, there was the bankruptcy and the selective elimination of entrenched leadership. Were things really changing, though? Despite his well intentioned plans, Henderson was fired by the board on December 1, 2009 some felt he wasn’t radical enough to change the company. His replacement was the person appointed by the obama administrations car czar to oversee the automakers revival after bankruptcy, ed whitacre, the well respected retired chairman and CEO of AT&T.
The challenges whitacre faces in changing GMs ‘plodding’ culture are vast. A recent meeting of the CEO and other top executives illustrates why. The meeting was called to approve plans for a ne generation of cars and trucks. Before the executives could go through all the pictures, charts, and the financial projections they had