Could the crisis at GM be due to downgrading of engineers and making the

[KlatooBNikto]

bean counters the kings? This thought came to me as I looked at the track record of the managements at Toyota, BMW and Honda.All engineering graduates who are at home in technology, manufacturing, reserach and development.GM's top management is dominated by accountants, finance men and marketers who pooh-pooh the very idea of an improved product and improved quality.That is shown by their arrogant dismissal of Hybrid Car Technology ( "we give the customer what they want and right now it is big trucks and SUVs").

The lack of engineers at the very top tiers of their management and no clear pathway for engineers to climb the ladder has made GM the thrid rate company it has become.

If the Kansas Neanderthals take over our educational system, the fate of our country will be the same. Isn't it ironic that India and China emphasize science, mathematics and engineering while we are regressing to Intelligent Design?

[mcscajun]

1. Ironic? No, it's Tragic.

We're going to be in the back seat of history in no time flat.

[tk2kewl]

2. Good theory.

[Pithy Cherub]

3. GM's senior leadership thought pResident Oil

would be able to keep the price of oil at a reasonable rate to spur/maintain growth in the SUV market. A good portion of their facilities were set up for SUV's. GM announced the upcoming demise of poor selling sedans. GM never widened their strategic scope to anticipate that a change in the price of oil would decimate everything. You can also include the 0% financing last year that some genius came up with. In other words, no scenario planning happened with worse case scenarios because they were looking historically at lots of spreadsheets with empirical evidence and not at the future with abundant ambiguity.

Look downstream to see how its affecting the supply chains/logistics all over the world to get a really good idea as to how bad this is.

[liberal N proud]

4. I think that the GM dilemma is about wages and benefits

You are right, it is the bean counters fault.
But more, It is about the big corporations finding away to break the unions and force them to make concessions on health care and retirement benefits while cutting the wages of the current employees.

If they can break GM the rest will fall in line without a crisis.
Look how well it worked for United.

[KlatooBNikto]

7. Our corporate masters, led by bean counters, know how to manipulate

wealth but do not know how to create it. That would require engineers and a large dose of honesty both of which are in short supply at our corporate boardrooms.

[Zenlitened]

11. "...know how to manipulate wealth but do not know how to create it"

Wow! That's a great way to sum it all up! :thumbsup: It's all about picking at the carcass for them, it really is.

[Gormy Cuss]

20. Call the bean counters what they are

MBAs without a clue.
The rise of the generalist MBA cult followed the Reagan revolution. Too many future MBAs enter grad school without any practical knowledge of business or industry. Students who were told that their principal duty as managers in a corporation was sustaining the stock value. Not to sustain the company, just the profits. Not to be innovative, just to make the minimum investment to sustain profitability. Not EVER to consider the personal impact of cost-cutting on the employees. Employees are widgets.
Is it any coincidence that executive compensation has outpaced rank-and-file compensation in the past twenty years?
I'm with you -- we need more people who understand the product in the boardroom.

[KlatooBNikto]

21. Many years ago, when I was a corporate VP myself, in a company

well known for its engineering excellence, a Wharton MBA was foisted on me.One fine day, when I was talking to him about some of the engineering challenges we have to overcome in a new product, he said,as far as I am concerned this product is the same as bananas to me. If we can make a greater profit selling bananas than this product, I would do it. I told him then and there he will not get a chance to market either bananas or our new product because I was terminating him.

[spuddonna]

23. If only there were more managers like you! :)

When I worked at Kodak in Roch NY in the late 90's I watched so many engineers and sw developers leave the company.

The bean counters saw a 'greater profit margin' in just selling their film, and didn't want to hurt the 'bottom line and stock prices' to spend R&D money on digital printer technology. The 'beanie's' view of the digital camera market was "it will force people to buy our paper!"... Meanwhile, Kodak invested its money in a lawsuit against Fuji (they were cutting into their market share), and watched as their stock dropped from the low $90's to $30's per share... Eventually, Kodak was forced to lay off over 15,000...

This, unfortunately, is the same story being told all over the US. Just change the name, and insert a different number of layoffs or tack a bankruptcy on the end...

[Dora]

5. Excellent point

I think you're pretty close to the truth.

America Inc has become all about eliminating People Who Think and Have Ideas from the power structures.

[tinrobot]

15. Reminds me of a quote about Disney

They stopped being a content creation company and have become a content management company.

Who runs Disney? Accountants.

Who runs Pixar? An animator, an engineer, and Steve Jobs.

I think you might be on to something.

[Dora]

19. I heard that quote recently too, and I was shocked.

shocked and disappointed. After all, I had grown up thinking that Disney represented all that was good about imagination and original thought.

There is no room any more for true entrepreneurship in this country. The marketplace is full of nothing but knockoffs of old ideas or, worse, reverse-engineered or pirated technology.

And the band played on.

[sweetheart]

6. This is a problem far beyond GM

I've noticed this trend towards the boardroom and upper eschelons of
management not being competent in the business line. You don't have to
now how to build a car, to sell one... and salespersons, accountants and
marketeers get promoted to the land of clouds where they've no
competence in the business line.

I've similarly experienced in senior management of software companies,
a dearth of actual competence in what the heck the products are, how
they are made, and why people buy them... rather, its this quarters
depreciation schedule on the capital assets offset by the tax breaks
of XYZ local government... bean counters indeed.

But this all falls to the failure of the corporate structure, that
the shareholder is inherently risk adverse and incompetent to actually
govern a company. Companies that have maintained business competence
over the long haul, generally have controlling shares concentrated in
to the hands of a family that "knows" the business line. Michelin
is a good example of this. The american bankers hate the concept,
but their shares have different voting weights, that you can be a
shareholder and have no votes, or a business line shareholder with
extra votes. I like this idea.

Democracy does not work in the boardroom. There needs to be a clear
controlling interest held by the business line competence.

[dbt]

8. I can't speak to the GM crisis, but

the SORRY-ASS state of Radio in this country is damn sure the fault of the bean counters!

[natrat]

17. and herr asscrack and poowell jr.

[forgethell]

9. Same thing destroyed the

old steel industry. The quarterly profit was king. No one looked long-term. The unions, also, played a big part in that they were unwilling to compromise when the money crunch began. Two mills I worked at went down the exact same way. In one of them, the employees had a chance to buy the frigging thing. They dithered around until past the judge's deadline for a decision, then made an offer. It was better than the one from the people that bought the plant, but the judge just said, "Too late."

Greed is not sin of the corporations only. the working man has his share of it.

[KlatooBNikto]

10. Now the world's largest steelmaker is an Indian company that was

patiently buying up steelmills all over the world at five cents on the dollar and now makes more than 100 million tons of steel.It is enjoying a boom because the markets in China and India are exploding.

[JHB]

12. The Reign of the Bean-Counters...

...is what has been afflicting pretty much ALL of American business for the last 20-30 years.

Let's take the Wayback Machine to 1980 and the Reagan Campaign: remember how his people argued that by cutting taxes the money freed up would be used to update our industrial plant, making us more efficient and competitive?

And what happened? That money went to fund a spree of mergers and leveraged buy-outs. And to building new plants -- in Mexico.

And who made the decisions to do these things? Know-it-all MBAs and other bean-counters, who would run a company for a few years, loot its on-hand capital, gut its assets, then skip out to some other lofty position while workers and small shareholders got screwed in the resulting collapse.

It's so bad it's tempting to suggest that all corporate officers without direct experience in making/doing the main product/service of the company be required to become a eunuch. At least that would demonstrate how far someone is willing to go for money.

[KlatooBNikto]

22. You can also lay the blame on the a--h's at Investment Banks who

made it possible for managements to get rich quick by developing the leveraged buyout schemes saddling successive buyers with enormous debt loads impossible to manage.If a manager can get a few million dollars in the next year, why should he patiently slog for the next twenty years learning how to make the product and market it profitably?
That, in essence, was what dragged our corporations down.

[cap]

24. when people focused on building a product

there was a set of innate engineering/cost constraints that forced a certain logic and adherence to standards (otherwise the thing didnt work at a reasonable price). Now share value is everything and the constraints are not those based in certain physical realities just perception. This is why our society is out of whack.

[Tyler Durden]

13. Mercinaries don't NEED science...

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS,
MARCHING AS TO WAR;
WITH THE CROSS OF JESUS,
GOING ON BEFORE!

[leftofthedial]

14. beancounters won the internal war at all the major record labels too

and the music industry has gone down the toilet

[natrat]

16. jeez talk about a "mature" economy

seems like our brighter days are behind us in that respect

[UdoKier]

18. The death of either Buick or Oldsmobile was inevitable.

The brands were way too similar and had the same demographic of older, stodgy buyers. GM was right to drop Olds, since the name just screams "I'm old and boring!"

It's sad to see Pontiac floundering, since it once had a pretty sporty image.

I agree with your premise, but the thing is that GM's quality has improved, but their cars by and large seem so dull compared to the other brands out there...

And it's not just GM. ALl the US car companies relied too heavily on the option-laden, high-profit-margin SUVs in the 90s, They should have had other things in mind for when the cheap gas and economic good times ended.

Personally, I've never driven anything but bare-bones econoboxes. I like them, and I don't want power windows or airbags or anything that drives up the price and may need to be fixed someday. (I realize that the airbags are the law now, but that was another nanny-state law, PUSHED BY THE CAR COMPANIES, that I disagreed with...)