GM: A View from the Back Seat – BusinessWeek
GM: A View from the Back Seat – BusinessWeek.
Read the article for the real meat, but this comes from someone that has covered GM, specifically, for quite some time for Business Week. David Welch, the author, handles the multitude of issues – from GM’s basic structure, strategy, the UAW, and for what former CEO Wagoner did and did not deserve blame in the end – quite well and very evenly.
What I find especially interesting is the comment about GroupThink at the beginning. The article doesn’t really return to it, but it paints a classic picture of this kind of problem. Everyone thinks that things are okay. Because they all tell each other things are okay and that they know what is going on (trucks are good! We’ll outlast our workforce!), there is a reinforcing cycle of presumption and bad decisions. No one really thinks beyond what has always been done, or those that do are ignored and/or ostracized.