From: V SCHWARTZ (vsaws@optonline.net)
Date: Mon May 15 2006 - 05:39:54 PDT
Right you are Dave , Flame suit is on. Vinny
----- Original Message -----
From: "MV" <MV@dc9.tzo.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2006 11:48 PM
Subject: Re: [MV] General Motors to End Hummer H1 Production - Some GM
history
> 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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>>
>>
>>
>
> ===Mil-Veh is a member-supported mailing list===
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