Word: gm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...personifies Detroit's new culture more engagingly than GM's Jack Smith, who has dispensed with nearly all the trappings of solemn power collected by his predecessors, including the dining room. He has even dropped the chairman's Christmas speech, once beamed to GM's faithful around the world. A senior executive says one reason may be the unforgettable scene in the cruelly funny film Roger and Me of Roger Smith reading from Dickens' A Christmas Carol while autoworkers were being evicted from their homes in Flint, Michigan...
Instead of closeting himself in his corner 14th-floor suite in Detroit headquarters, Smith spends most of his 12- and 14-hour days in his modest office at GM's technical center in Warren, 15 miles away. His goal is to convert the research center into the core of GM's new-product operations by bringing together such specialists as chassis, brake and electrical engineers to form platform teams for launches...
...largest and most stultifying corporate bureaucracy, Smith's management style is already showing through. The General Motors that used to trumpet each minor fix in its operations as if it were the second Industrial Revolution is reinventing itself with little fanfare. Smith has slashed the number of bureaucrats at GM's Pentagonian headquarters from 13,000 to fewer than 2,000. "There were duplicating functions all over the place," he says. "Basically, they were just checking up on what was going on elsewhere...
Smith bluntly concedes that GM is starting out well behind the rest of the Detroit pack. "The problem was never the people," he says. "It was the screwed-up structure we had. We had to change it. It took us years to understand that. You go through a denial phase. Ford went through its own changes a lot earlier than we did, and is very good today. Chrysler really went to the wall and got its act together. We had a history I'd like not to repeat. Now we'd like to get this baby fixed...
...industry that once took its lumps together is now finding common cause in areas from public policy to jointly financed advanced research. Ford's McTague, Chrysler's Castaing and their GM counterpart, Arvin Mueller, meet monthly for private dinners in Detroit, overseeing their joint-research programs under a consortium called USCAR, which invests $300 million annually (including $75 million in federal grants) in a range of projects including advanced batteries for electric vehicles, lightweight composite materials for better fuel economy, and environmental improvements on paint and fuel emissions and recyclable parts. No project is more ambitious than the agreement, announced...