I was educated as an Engineer in the 60′s born into a white collar (but clerk level) GM family. Wrote my MBA master thesis in 1975 entitled “Human Resource Management in a Recessionary Economy”. It was about taking outside contractors engaged on a large Ford Transmission Plant expansion back into the 11 or so internal trades respresented in the UAW.

Through a Professional Engineerng career and for the last 15 years as a Technical/Management consultant in the Call Center
Industry as a family partner in a company started by Lyn, my wife, 5 years earlier.

So I do not plan on retiring, the Michael DeBagies of the world are my kind of hero and the “it’s all about me, short term Wall Street results and non-tranparancy and greed that was unfortunately begun in the 60′s” are on my black list.

Staying current in this fast moving and no so progressive world has put me into a position of history and current involved at viewing may companies at Executive an Middle Managent level.

Agree with Bob “The CEOs of these Auto)and many other companies do not have pride in real survival and real growth in the companies they represent; they do not take responsibility and act more like “employees.”

THESE ARE LEGACY COMPANIES, RUN BY LEGACY PEOPLE, PROMOTING LEGACY PEOPLE & LEGACY PROCESSES AND PAYING THEMSELVES WITH OUT REAL PERFORMANCE CRITERIA.

I WAS BORN TO DISPISE THE JAPANESE AUTO COMPANIES(HOW OLD IS THAT THINKING?

Today I know the difference. The US Auto people are financial in background – they do not relate to customer and less to the employee -that is why Unions were needed then an now for the US companies. But it does not have to be that way.

The robberys of Wall Street have always been that and we know it but now they have taken it to another level. And they have help from Bush and Paulson big time.

Play back the 2003 tax break give thsoe with AGI’s greater than $1Million, $93,000 in breaks and the middle income folks $215. Only with a Republican Congress.

And that is the way the US Auto firms are run. I owned Cadillacs for years and new got a break on the next one. Even owned two Diesel Cadillacs-bad CRM and back short term product decisions.

Employees are too many doing meanial jobs without a feeling of ownerhip- no wonder the guys in the cornor office go ahead with that lack of customer and lack of employee feeling and lack of product feeling.

Like lawyer and accounts, if the marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing and service people don’t do their jobs then there is not need of the lawyer or accounts.

What does a typlical US Auto company CEO and Board (another time on this) bring to the party?

Aside from that, LET THEM FAIL. Someone will come along and restructure the company and take over. They will already know the path to failure. In fact, the only real downside to this is that there’s a good chance, the group that comes in and scoops up whats left of these companies might just be Honda or Toyota. Oh! What A Feeling!

The problem is there are no real “owners” running Detroit’s auto makers. Do you think Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, etc., would accept seeing their companies lose market share from the 1970s all the way to the present? Absolutely not.

Much like the energy crisis, Detroit’s problems were caused by decades of mismanagement. Zero percent financing in good economic times with low energy costs largely hid those problems.

The VAR Guy wishes the media would spend MORE time discussing the pros/cons of Detroit companies filing for bankruptcy. What’s the downside? What’s the potential upside? Why isn’t that an option being discussed far more vocally?

1. Management: They’ve got to go. Goodbye. They blew it.
2. Workers: The unions have got to get real. Swallow the bitter pill now and work with management ASAP. Trying to maintain legacy cost structures for the unions ain’t gonna work this time.

Imagine if the CEOs of Dell, Apple and HP all went to DC asking for money because they failed to compete and innovate vs. foreign competitors? In the hyper-competitive high-tech world, you live or die by cannibalizing your own products.

Detroit has been happy to see their market share decline — non-stop — for decades. Everyone is going to pay a price, in some way, for Detroit’s failures.

But remember: People expected IBM to break up in the early 1990s amid massive losses, and a new CEO (Gerstner) from outside the industry bucked conventional wisdom and found a new path (IBM Global Services) to revive the company. Apple almost went bankrupt, and returning CEO Steve Jobs bucked conventional wisdom by signing a financial deal with MSFT. It allowed Apple’s R&D team to stall for time, while ensuring MSFT supported Apple products.

The VAR Guy isn’t suggesting IT is the same as Detroit. But moving forward, Detroit has to act more like the IT industry: Cannibalize your own products. And disrupt the competition. And yes, outsource if you can find lower-cost talent elsewhere. Hate to write that last point. But it’s a global economy, folks.

Or can we let the striking workers know the addresses of the CEO’s and turn a blind eye to the reprisals.

A little Range justice WILL work. Hot Tar and Feathers.

My next vehicle will be a Toyota or Nissan. I’m sick of the factory recalls, design flaws and lackluster performance.