G.M.’s Flawed Culture

Steven Rattner, NYT
JUNE 11, 2014

For me, portions of the report of the investigation into General Motors’ safety problems with certain cars were a journey down memory lane:

The empty gestures known as the “G.M. nod” and the “G.M. salute.” The reluctance to deliver bad news up the management chain. The overreliance on superficial PowerPoint presentations. The lack of communication among different slices of an overstuffed bureaucracy.

Those were just some of the many startling – and troubling – phenomena that the team I headed as President Obama’s lead auto adviser found when we began meeting with senior G.M. executives in early 2009 in order to provide the president with an action plan for how to save the nation’s largest automaker.

We all knew going in that the giant automaker was in bad shape. But nonetheless, looking under the hood of G.M. was the most stunningly disappointing dissection of a paid-up member of corporate America in my 30-year Wall Street career.

(More here.)