Ed Whitacre says General Motors nearly died because of bad management.
"The economy didn't do that to GM. The union didn't do that to GM. And the Japanese yen certainly didn't do that to GM — GM's management did that to GM," he writes in his forthcoming memoir. "They just never had the smarts or the guts or whatever you want to call it to make a course correction to give GM a shot at a better future.
Soon after becoming CEO in December 2009, Whitacre spent an hour talking to one very senior executive who tried to "explain to me what he did at GM. And the more he talked, the more nebulous his job sounded. By the time he finished, I came away feeling that this guy really didn't have anything to do," Whitacre wrote. "Most troubling to me, none of this seemed to bother him, or even occur to him."
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