[quote=Rt.66]Allen it is you that is Cherry picking. You use Unsubstantiable variables to make your point. I am using cold hard realities.
Who knows to what extent GMs management caused problems? It’s hard to substantiate that.
After all, they were heroes just a few years ago with awesome SUVs they were making tons of profit on and people bought like crazy. Look at the world beating Corvette? How about the new Camero. I argue that they have made the right choices given the FACT that they are not allowed to compete on an even playing field and thus have been FORCED to put their efforts into more expensive models with better margins.
You try and make a low profit margin small car with a $4k disadvantage before you even weld one panel.
Your position is debatable.
What we need not debate is that our Gov. helps foreign countries beat us. Why? Who knows, maybe it’s just trade charity to win/keep allies?
The $4k per car trade policy gift/advantage that Japan and Korea have enjoyed over us is reason enough for our industry’s problems. There it is, it’s real and it a deal breaking, unsustainable reality for our auto makers.
Also, lack of support by US consumers is an obvious, real nail in the coffin. Millions of Americans sending the dollars they earn here, over to Japan, Korea etc. can in no one’s mind not have wreaked substantial damage.
Anything else is just “might have contributed” cherry picking conversation.
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Rt.66: It’s actually very easy to substantiate how GM’s management contributed: There are literally hundreds of case studies on this. I did two myself, one in Advanced Managerial Accounting and one in an upper division business management class (both at SDSU). You should also refer to studies on Deming’s “Just In Time” inventory and supply chain management system, which US automakers shunned and the Japanese adopted and with great success.
My dad worked at Ford Aerospace from the early 1970s till he retired in 1989 and told me that Ford Motor Co. had sent teams out from Michigan to study the way the Aerospace division did business and largely because Aerospace had eliminated nearly all of their engineering “bottlenecks” through process engineering and FoMoCo wanted to adopt that process. Unfortunately, all of the execs from Michigan were of the opinion that they couldn’t emulate the process because the politics in back at HQ wouldn’t allow implementation.
There is nothing “fuzzy” that doesn’t allow for substantiation or study. It’s been done to death, actually. This slow death took decades and much of it is attributable to poor labor policies (both union and management), lack of focus on the customer in the 1970s and 1980s while GM and Ford were out buying up Hughes and EDS and trying to be “world class” and an inability to keep up with the times.
Those periods as of late when you call GM management “heroes” is nothing more than a surge of consumers buying high margin SUVs with self-destructive (for GM and the consumer) 0% purchase programs. GM itself knew that both the vehicles and the incentive programs were unsustainable and Wagoner (and Mullaly at Ford) said this repeatedly.
