Hmmm…Well, what did GM say?
”While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you,” the company said in the magazine ad. “At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pick-up trucks and SUVs. And, we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry.”
The company just admitted it drove itself (no pun intended) into the ground. They made poor business decisions and now have no ability to continue operations without government loans…. Human impact aside, why should we bother supporting a bail out?
Two things missing from the admission where a) we are sorry for operating our company in this fashion and b) here is how we are going to change.
Obviously, admitting any type of fault would place management in a questionable legal situation. While they did run the company into the ground, why admit your mistake when shareholders could sue you? More importantly, there was no evidence of change…. No plan as to how the company would avoid such a situation moving forward.
The only company I support in this process thus far is Ford due to strategic moves they made last year, and because they are claiming they do not need the money for operations but simply as a backstop incase things were to get worse (which I suspect they will).
Basically, Ford is the only one with a plan and is acting accordingly. If anyone should get “bailed out”, we should look in their direction.