From: MV (MV@dc9.tzo.com)
Date: Sun May 14 2006 - 20:48:26 PDT
Vinny,
You obviously do not know what you are talking about.
This might be over your head Vinny, but I'll try and help you.
When Ed Cole and his like got out of GM, the engineers left and the bean
counters took over. Max profits mean make big vehicles that sell for
big $. When I started working for GM in '76 I was frequently confused
with Ed Cole's son. I scared the hell out of a lot of managers when I
first met them. Ed Cole retired just before I started but the guy was a
legend. He as the last engineer/car nut that they have had at the helm.
All the guys since then have been bean counters. I bailed out in 1982
and most of my fellow engineers who had any guts did the same thing.
The work environment towards engineers started to get pretty hostile.
It got a lot worse after I left.
CEO list since the 60's:
Ed Cole - already discussed - want more info google Ed Cole, GM
Murphy characterized by Dave Cole as a great guy to cast as a CEO by
Hollywood. (Didn't know shxt, but looked good.) (See article below)
Next was Roger Smith - as in the "Roger and Me" movie by Michael Moore.
About as brain dead as they come. A bean counter from the early 60's
with GM. I was in Flint in the late 70's frequently - and Michael Moore
was right on target - it was really that bad. I personally met the guy,
he was a loser, no doubt. He knew a lot about beans, and that is all.
Next was John Smith - a former Payroll Auditor. Great start as a bean
counter right? Qualified to be a CEO for GM - I think not.
By the time John Smith got out, the die was cast. GM had put itself
clearly in a big deep hole. What is going on today is totally
predictable.
BTW Vinny, GM made a lot of MVs. You probably didn't know that seeing
that you seem to concentrate on stuff like where you mount long horn
steer horns. That's ok though Vinny, I'll try to get you up to speed. (;->)
I feel sorry for a lot of the folks at GM. Most of them had little to no
control over where the company was headed. I know of several people
who have been cut after 25 years or service. Yep, they will get a
pension eventually, if GM doesn't gut the pension fund, but they can't
get an equivalent job in general to replace the one lost.
A lot of the hourly workers were/are tremendously over paid. There was
a story about a guy in Saginaw, MI who was making 92K/year working at a
stamping plant doing manual labor. He has a huge house, big cottage on
a lake and he is screwed. I sure hope that he saved some money, some
did and a lot did not. Back when I was working for GM in the early
80's, a lot of the maintenance guys were making $50K and up. They
worked all of the time though, 60+ hours per week, but they made some
serious cash. The engineers typically made a lot less than that but
worked similar hours.
Dave
>> From the Detroit Free Press - January 2006
Thomas A. Murphy, who led General Motors Corp. through a booming period
of the 1970s, died Wednesday in Boynton Beach, Fla., at age 90.
Murphy was chairman and CEO of GM from 1974 to 1981, when the automaker
accounted for well over half of all cars and trucks sold in the United
States. GM had become so powerful the U.S. government was keeping an eye
on the company as a possible monopoly that needed to be broken up.
"It was an era when the primary concern at GM was the antitrust
department," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive
Research in Ann Arbor.
A tall, reserved executive, Murphy was the stable, dignified head of the
company. He was known for his character.
"He was the sort of person Hollywood would cast as a CEO," said Cole,
whose father, Ed Cole, was president of GM in the 1970s.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Inductees
Back
John F. Smith, Jr. (1938 - )
John F. “Jack” Smith Jr. reached the top of the world’s largest company,
and he did it the old fashioned way: hard work, always keeping his eye
on the task in front of him, and climbing the corporate ladder rung by rung.
In January 1996, Jack Smith was elected chairman of General Motors
Corporation, after having served as the company’s president and CEO
since 1992.
“I wasn’t looking for the job, that’s for sure,” Smith was once quoted
as saying. Yet, it was a job he was destined for.
Smith joined General Motors in 1961 as a payroll auditor at the Fisher
Body plant in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was a great job, he thought,
and not far from his hometown of Worcester. His hard work and
no-nonsense approach to his assignments got him noticed, and GM soon had
plans to put Jack to work in places other than Massachusetts.
Former GM Chairman Roger Smith, who in the 1960s was General Motors’
assistant treasurer working in New York, took notice of the younger
Smith and invited him to come work in the Big Apple. Jack Smith refused.
“I’d heard great things about him,” Roger Smith once said, “and tried to
get him to come to New York. He turned me down, so I had to go up to
Framingham myself to talk him into it!”
That was 1966. By 1974, Jack Smith had taken over Roger Smith’s job as
assistant treasurer.
As assistant treasurer, Jack Smith was no longer an anonymous figure at
General Motors. More accurately, he was now under the white light of
corporate visibility, and his work got him steadily promoted to
positions of even greater responsibility.
Assistant comptroller in 1976. Comptroller in 1980. Director of
worldwide product planning in 1982. President of General Motors -Canada
in 1984. President of General Motors - Europe in 1987.While director of
worldwide planning in 1982, Smith was GM’s lead negotiator with Toyota
that resulted in the revolutionary 50/50 GM/Toyota joint venture called
New United Motor Manufacturing, located in Fremont, California.
In 1990, Jack Smith was named vice chairman and was elected GM’s
president in 1992. Smith, however, immediately found himself in the
middle of the biggest challenge of his career. GM had suffered record
financial losses in the early 1990s, and corporate profitability was
nowhere in sight. The future of the company was in doubt.
Clearly alarmed, GM’s board of directors took matters into their own
hands, naming John G. Smale, an outside director from Proctor & Gamble
Co., as non-executive chairman. The board’s next move was to once again
tap Jack Smith, its rising star, as chief executive officer.
Smith’s daunting task: to restructure a company that was essentially
running the same as when Alfred P. Sloan organized it 70 years before.
Smith had to make General Motors faster, leaner and more human. He had
to break down the walls of long-entrenched bureaucracy. He had to bring
products to the marketplace faster and of higher quality. He had to
re-build relationships with labor, suppliers and dealers. And time was
of the essence.
Smith immediately streamlined and consolidated operating divisions and
duplicative engineering centers. He was a pioneer in investing in the
Asia/Pacific region, particularly China, a move that has General Motors
in a leadership position today. In 1993, just a year after its financial
crisis, the company turned a profit of $2.5 billion. In 1994, the
company earned $4.9 billion and was clearly on its way back. Jack Smith
had righted the ship.
Smith retired from General Motors in 2003. He accepts his role as GM’s
savior the same way he accepted the top job in the first place –
reluctantly. In a matter of a few years, he made General Motors a
leaner, more profitable company, doing what so many said couldn’t be
done – making the elephant dance. And along the way he respected – and
was respected by – employees, dealers, suppliers, labor, governments and
competitors alike.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
V SCHWARTZ wrote:
> It is my personel opinion that the engineers at GM are the ones who
> screwed up the verhicles to begin with. So I have little sympathy for
> the lot of them. I do feel sory for the mass of hourly workers that will
> loose everything they erer worked for. Engineers could have been
> developing more effecient vehicles half a century ago. but they choose
> to keepselling junk that would not last the length of the loan. so Mr J
> Q. public would have to buy another piece of junk. So I guess you are
> part of the problem Dave. My regrets to Albert for the OT rant. Vinny
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "MV" <MV@dc9.tzo.com>
> To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
> Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2006 11:57 AM
> Subject: Re: [MV] General Motors to End Hummer H1 Production
>
>
>> > We'll be down to Honda, Toyota (Seen the new FJ Cruiser? Its METAL!!!)
>> > Volvo, S&S, Dodge, and a few others like Volvo.
>>
>> It sure would be nice if some of these were actually American
>> companies. Well I think S&S is, but that hardly counts. Being an
>> ex-Detroiter and an ex-GM engineer just makes all of these bunglings
>> hard to swallow. They were screwed up when I left in '82 and it's been
>> a downhill slide for GM ever since. In the late 70's GM believed that
>> they were making close to 60% of the cars sold in the US. They didn't
>> advertise that fact and actually skewed the numbers that were reported
>> to avoid anti-trust actions. They were seriously concerned about the
>> Government breaking up the company. Not much later some real bozo's
>> (bean counters) took control of the company and began to drive it into
>> the ground.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> Ryan Gill wrote:
>>
>>> At 10:39 AM -0400 5/13/06, MV wrote:
>>>
>>>> GM - a bunch of idiots trying to make things.
>>>>
>>>> Their decision making ability is dismal.
>>>>
>>>> Example: GM Heavy truck division sold to Volvo - now Volvo truck -
>>>> uh... have you seen just a couple of Volvo trucks on the road?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Volvos been doing the Military Truck thing in Europe. Give them
>>> another 5-10 yeras, and they'll be shooting for US contracts soon.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> If only these guys had a clue about how to run a company.
>>>> Unfortunately all of the guys who actually grew General Motors and
>>>> Ford are dead. Apparently now the only guys in control are bean
>>>> counters and since they don't make beans, they are screwed.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
>
>
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