Scrivener.net

Obama's "Car Czar", Steven Rattner, tells us all just how bad the management was at Government General Motors when he arrived there -- and about the radical steps he had to take to shake it from the top...

Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company ... We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify expenditures.

The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones)...

I found CEO Rick Wagoner to be likable, dedicated, and generally knowledgeable. But he set a tone of "friendly arrogance" that seemed to permeate the organization. Certainly he and his team seemed to believe that virtually all of their problems could be laid at the feet of some combination of the financial crisis, oil prices, the yen-dollar exchange rate, and the UAW.

It seemed completely obvious to us that any management team that had burned through $21 billion of cash in a year and another $13 billion in the first quarter of 2009 could not be allowed to continue. Equally important, GM's February viability plan was more "business as usual" and not the aggressive new approach that we felt was essential...

To radically shake up GM's management culture and instill within it that entirely new aggressiveness, I knew what I had to do: fire Wagoner and install a new leader -- Wagoner's own #2 man, his fellow GM "lifer" and long-time sequesteree of that uppermost executive floor, Fritz Henderson, following Wagoner's recommendation on this...

I feel so much better about all this now.

(OK, for all the laywers out there, one of those paragraphs was not part of Rattner's story as published -- though it deserved to be.)