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From the NY Times of 5 Dec 2008:

At G.M., Innovation Sacrificed to Profits
General Motors did not apologize for anything in its first trip to Congress more than two weeks ago to plead for a federal rescue. The company’s only problem, it insisted, was the current financial crisis.

“What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup, or our business plan, or our long-term strategy,” Rick Wagoner, G.M.’s chief executive, said in his testimony.

Just another in a list of maybe 100 posted examples of why GM's greatest enemy is Rick Wagoner and his cadre of MBAs. He lies to himself - as well as to Congress.

Time and again over the last 30 years, G.M. has spent billions of dollars on innovative ideas like its Saturn small-car company in the 1980s and the EV1 electric vehicle in the 1990s, only to then deprive those projects of further financing because money was needed elsewhere or because they were not delivering enough profit.

That will not change until a car guy replaces Wagoner.

The failure is frustrating to those who remember the high value placed on innovation by legendary company leaders like Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and Charles E. Wilson, who felt G.M. could sell cars to the masses by demonstrating it was out in front.

“Until the 1960s, innovation was part of G.M.’s DNA,” said John Casesa, a veteran industry analyst with the Casesa Shapiro Group. “Now, it’s a matter of trying to play catch-up.”

One such area is hybrid technology, an area where G.M. might be leading if it had encouraged the engineers who led its hybrid development as long ago as the 1970s, and continued building on expertise it gained with the EV1.

While Toyota has sold more than 600,000 Prius hybrids in the United States since 2000, General Motors will not start selling its Volt plug-in hybrid until 2010, when it hopes to sell 10,000 of them in the first year.

How widespread is denial? Another was so brainwashed by GM rhetoric as to tell me the Volt is not a hybrid; it is a plug-in car. How widespread is this "I love George Jr" disease?

Only now, in its second plea to Congress, did [GM] acknowledge what just about every industry analyst has said for years: that G.M. has too many brands, now that its market share has fallen by nearly two-thirds from its peak in 1960 to just 22 percent today.

G.M. said last week that it would focus on just four core brands — Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac — and sell or play down Saturn, Pontiac, Saab and Hummer.

The goal, it said in its new plan, is “to focus available resources and growth strategies on the company’s profitable operations.”

Duh. Too little too late. It needs to eliminate those other divisions - not just 'play them down'. GM employee jobs are that much at risk.

Restructuring was not even considered two weeks ago when Rick Wagoner told Congress that GM only needed a few tens of $billions and everything would be fine. How many times need this be posted before it even becomes obvious to George Jr and the brain of Terri Schiavo.

Mr. Casesa said that pattern stemmed from the fact that so many of the company’s top executives had a background in finance, not in engineering and designing cars and trucks.

Duh. Anyone with enough sense to not be a wacko extremist would have known that.

If a newspaper publishes an article this honest, then GM would have taken revenge as GM did to the LA Times in April 2005. Now it is safe to be honest. Rick Wagoner has done more to destroy America than Saddam Hussein. That too is not even debatable.

G.M.’s failure to press forward with its own hybrids was a deep disappointment to Robert C. Stempel, the former chief executive who gave the go-ahead to the EV1 program during his brief tenure in the early 1990s.

“I’m furious,” Mr. Stempel said in a 2003 interview. “G.M. had the technology. The lead was there. I know it.”

Just excerpts from that article. Bottom line - Rick Wagoner will not even admit GM has a problem. The only problem, he says, is the economy! Yes, one must can be as dumb as George Jr to be GM's CEO.