Will the much-lamented insular culture at General Motors Corp. finally change? Possibly, says Marina Whitman, a professor the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and a former chief economist at GM. Here's her reasoning, from a
Q&A posted by the school:
Even the much-maligned Roger Smith did a number of things to try to change the culture, and the culture has tended to fight back. Now, the culture has never confronted a shock of this magnitude. So maybe this really will change things. There were certain symbols that allowed both the management and the workers to believe they were a breed apart. The management had all kinds of perks and the workers had these incredibly high oligopolistic wages and benefits. They all saw this as a kind of entitlement. I would guess those expectations must be gone now on the part of both executives and workers. Being clubbed by reality may well be effective.Whitman's worried, though, about the perils of government ownership of GM, and the conflict between the mandate to make money and the mandate to go green and small. Like a lot of people (including Alan Greenspan and some GM executives) she thinks the solution here is a broad-based energy tax. Alas, that's not likely until Washington, and specifically Congress, gets clubbed by reality. -
Kenneth Klee
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