February 11, 2009

BE DiFFERENT ideas for General Motors - Part 2

Here are more suggestions for GM strategists and planners:

Get off the product flogging kick. Your success will not depend on the products and technologies you push on your customers; rather on the extent to which you are able to address an unmet need or desire better than anyone else. Or at least if you talk about your ‘going green’, hybrid, electric car or fuel efficiency programs be explicit and tell how they will translate into unique customer benefits that only you will provide.

Cut the CRAP. You really need to get serious about dumping the things that do not align with your Survival Plan. This includes product lines and markets. Maybe you can’t be successful in North America! No one will thank you by staying in markets where you can’t make money. Your investors expect you to make tough decisions. Do you really need 15 hybrids by 2012 or is this product mania with no market reality?

Reassign or release employees currently associated with non-strategic activities as dictated by your Survival Plan. Beware of Managers of irrelevance in your organization who will only infect the rest of your workforce with change inertia if you leave them unattended.

If you want to sell anything, sell trusted relationships with your customers rather than flogging your technology aspirations and products on them. You are dying and need to re-establish trust with the market. This will only come if you get customer obsessed and deal more with what you are doing for them to be a healthy vibrant competitor.

Focus on execution. Don’t spend copious time trying to inch perfection out of your Survival Plan. The law of diminishing returns is at play here and it is more important to get on with it and not dwell on a 100% perfect plan (which doesn’t exist anyways). Your struggle back from potential demise rests in how well you execute a ‘good plan’; flawless execution in the trenches will win out in the long run.

Look at costs after you have devised how you intend to address the market not before. Consider the BE DiFFERENT profit equation as a guide. Here it is: Cost = Revenue - Profit. Determine how much revenue your Survival Plan will yield then subtract your profit expectations to get how much you can afford to spend operating the business.

Time to move on from GM. I hope they listen. Cheers, Roy Osing

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Posted 2.11.09 at 06:30 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment