Fritz Henderson’s remarks this morning on General Motors’ speedy exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy were a pretty sweeping condemnation of the old GM’s culture and structure.
His decision to sweep away entire layers of regional management, and eliminate the entire group running the North American business and taking charge himself, suggest there was a lot of redundancy.
Of course, the fact that GM is selling its Opel operations in Europe and will only retain a minority stake makes a coherent global structure more difficult. But Mr Henderson is making the best of a bad job by giving Nick Reilly the job of running international operations from Shanghai.
The theme of reducing the amount of time spent talking and prevaricating in meetings is common to GM and Ford, where Alan Mulally has made much of his effort to speed up decision-making.
Maybe the most telling thing Mr Henderson said was to quote Einstein’s dictum that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
It has always struck me that the inwardly-turned culture of Detroit companies gave them an ingrained ability to stick to the same path despite the clear evidence that customers were abandoning them.
Hopefully, Mr Henderson will manage to change that at GM but there is nothing more difficult than altering the long-established patterns of behaviour at venerable companies.
Mr Henderson is clearly in a hurry. He marked down next year for an initial public offering to make GM a public company again and said he intended to repay government loans “much sooner” than 2015.
