Business

Obama's Ex-Car Czar Slaps Rick Wagoner In NYT Column About 'GM's Flawed Culture'

June 12, 2014, 10:36 AM

As the president's top auto industry adviser, Steven Rattner got an outsider's view inside GM -- which looked like a car wreck at times, he writes in The New York Times.

Featured_steven-rattner_13035
Past presidential adviser Steve Rattner recalls seeing " the get-along, go-along GM way of shoving money ay a problem in the hope that it would go away." 

The company internal report on its response to a deadly ignition switch defect reminds him of "a dysfunctional culture [that] had direct and disastrous consequences for the quality of decision-making", Rattner writes Thursday in a commentary headlined "GM's Flawed Culture."

Looking under the hood of GM was the most stunningly disappointing dissection of a member of corporate America in my 30-year Wall Street career. . . .

Emblematic of the company’s lack of management accountability was the insistence of its chief executive officer, G. Richard Wagoner Jr., that its problems were all the fault of external forces: its unions, oil prices, the credit crisis and competition from Japanese imports.

Yet its arch-rival, Ford, facing that very same list of challenges, avoided bankruptcy and a government handout.

Rattner, lead adviser to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry for five months in 2009, says the GM report released June 5 has echoes of problems his Treasury Department team saw.:

  • The empty gestures known as the “GM nod” and the “GM salute.”
  • The reluctance to deliver bad news up the management chain.
  • The over-reliance on superficial PowerPoint presentations.
  • The lack of communication among different slices of an overstuffed bureaucracy.  

He gives a vivid example:

Soon after I arrived at Treasury, I saw firsthand GM's problems when it proposed injecting yet more capital into one of its far-flung, loss-making subsidiaries, without any analysis of why the additional investment made sense.

It was just more of the get-along, go-along GM way of shoving money at a problem in the hope that it would go away.

Rattner believes current CEO Mary Barra "faces her own challenges" in trying to tilt traditions in a new direction. "Without getting the culture right, GM can never be declared fully healed," he concludes. "That is still a work in progress." 

-- Alan Stamm


Read more:  The New York Times


Leave a Comment:

Photo Of The Day