Word: gm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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GENERAL MOTORS The automaker moved three of its factories to Matamoros, where, a GM manager admitted in a 1989 internal memo, the company sold barrels contaminated with toxic residues to a metal recycler. "This is in direct violation of the law," the manager wrote. A GM study found solvents, which can be carcinogenic and may damage developing fetuses, in GM's wastewater discharge. Still other documents show that GM used three and four times the amount of solvents in Mexico as it did at a comparable plant in Dayton, Ohio. "Not allowed in Dayton," noted a handwritten GM memo...
...role in ads for the '97 Catera. The "Caddy that zigs" is aimed at younger, entry-level luxury buyers in their 30s and 40s, almost a generation behind most traditional Cadillac owners. The duck may entertain such prospects, but it also infuriated many Cadillac loyalists and even some of GM's top brass. In the past, the duck and the campaign (as well as whoever was in charge) might have ended up as so much corporate pate. But this time Catera's brand manager, Dave Nottoli, 40, held his ground. The duck stays. Says Nottoli: "He's just a little...
...Dave, whatever happened to gear ratios? This new GM-speak can strike outsiders as numbingly programmatic. At GM's technical and design center in Warren, Michigan, for example, the walls are a marketspeak mural of arrows, block charts, one-word product descriptions and macro boxes of jargon like "needs target," "needs profile," "benefit focus" and "reason for being." Go inside GM's design studios, and its artists work under Brave New World banners exhorting them to remember what their 2000-era cars and trucks are supposed to represent. Flying above one such future vehicle...
Without exception, a corporate cultural revolution of this scale is not won without a vicious fight, and GM is still chock full of gearheads who are torqued off at Smith for abandoning them to folks who wouldn't know which end of a wrench to hold. And GM's bureaucracy, as thick as any company's, can still downshift a project to neutral at the drop of a meeting. One high-level executive says the parade of meetings leaves him only 30 hours a month to work on new products and sales. "Things are 100% better than they were...
Nevertheless, GM's $6 billion investment simply pays the price of admission back into the car wars. Now the company has to persuade the customers it has so carefully targeted to change their recent behavior and buy GM. Getting your customers back is the hardest task in retail. Sounding like a true car guy with some of that old-time sales religion, Chevrolet general manager John Middlebrook lays on the challenge: "We have people who swore they were never going to buy another Chevrolet or any GM product. It's time to bring them back into the fold. We need...