LyrArc Article Gist
With Whitacre in charge at GM there is a change of style and substance that just flows from who the man is. He is a no-nonsense guy, who once told a colleague from his days at Southwestern Bell, that God gave us two eyes and one mouth for the right reason so we should use it in that proportion. He is quite matter of fact about approaching the probems at GM right from the beginning. From those early meetings at the Westin airport hotel in Detroit, where he would tell GM executives and Henderson that if things did not happen the way they should and quickly he would find the right people. After there was a lot of soul searching about Henderson's decision to sell Opel- and three directors with private equity background decided it was bad for GM, that GM needed Opel for its compact and midsize car engineering and sales volume- Henderson was replaced as CEO. The decision was reversed. Within 3 months of Henderson's departure four other executives were let go, 20 more were reassigned and seven outsiders were brought in to fill top jobs. Lutz was marginalized. Reuss in his forties was placed in charge of N. America. The metrics were simplified from Wagoner's days to six: market share, revenue, operating profit, cash flow, quality, and customer satisfaction. His approach to get managers who make decisions fast and correct mistakes speedily. Vice chairman and CFO, Christopher Liddell, is from Microsoft and joined in January. Liddell points out that 12 of the 13 person GM executive committee are either new to the auto industry or outsiders. And the seniormost Whitacre and Liddell, are new to the auto industry and outsiders, so Whitacre can point out that GM has run the business in a more complicated way than it needs to be. The big changes are cultural. And making these changes for a company the size of GM and with the trauma that happened at GM with the speedy decline, required someone with the experience Whitacre gained in tackling the problems he faced at Southwesten Bell and the new AT&T, with its changing culture. The tough down-to-earth nature of the guy, with no affectations or layers to his personality whatsoever, proved an asset at the new AT&T and now at GM. Other decisions he has made at GM, are some strategic ones like bringing down incentives to sell cars, the latest being letting market share drop in March in the face of Toyota's heavy use of incentives to recover from the recall crisis, but sticking to reducing the incentive dollars by $1200 to $3500 per car. This made it possible to achieve sales goals. And some tactical but of great significance, from a common sense approach to GM advertising with his remark "I'm sick of Howie Long." Pitchman Long was a football player, and what Whitacre insisted on was showing off GM's best models and features to blow the competition, like the "May the Best Car Win," campaign. That many of GM's ads didn't focus on the cars and didn't make any sense, like little Cadillacs flying out of a birdhouse, makes this truly incredible to an outsider. Other things Whitacre brings are a change in his expectations, and his overall demeanor. This impatience may be a good thing for GM especially with the capital investment in new models, plant investment and better decisionmaking, and commonsense approach, to back it up. In the car industry it can't hurt for the top guy to look at the car clay models and ask why they can't be brought to market in 12 months. It gets people thinking differently. Asking a Cadillac dealer he knows in San Antonio why they should'nt be selling twice as many Cadillacs if the marketing was better. It helps when the top guy can visit a plant and have "diagonal slice meetigs" with plant staff, workers and UAW people, to talk about things in sweat shirt and jeans with no airs about yourself whatsoever, and to follow this up with a repeat meeting some months later and announce a $136 million investment, as he did with the Fairfax plant in Kansas....

LyrArc Article Gist
A Defense Department biannual report that is mandated by Congress points to little improvement in the last 6 months in Afghanistan. In 92 districts studied for the their support of the Afghan government or opposition to it, not one supported the government. In 44 districts the people were neutral in this evaluation. The number of districts sympathetic to the insurgency increased to 48 in March 2010 from 33 in December 2009. Clearly the Afghan government of Karzai has little support in the country and this remains the major question: whether this war can be successful in the face of this fact and its continuance, and whether the merits of expenditure of time, effort, resources and lives to keep a government like this in power makes sense for America's security interests. About $6.6 billion is allocated by Congress for the training of Afghan security forces. But the Afghan police force consists of mostly illiterate and poorly trained persons and virtually nonexistent judicial system. Combine this with corruption, incompetence and threats and this force is really ineffective. Overall the Afghan security forces once trained don't appear from this report to be able to sustain themselves in the face of an insurgency whose "operational capabilities and organizational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding", and with "strength and ability of the shadow governance to discredit the authority of the Karzai government increasing."...

LyrArc Article Gist
Questions raised by analysts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the European Policy Center in Brussels, about the lack of leadership from Chancellor Merkel of Germany and EU leaders in addressing swiftly the crisis facing Greece and countries in southern Europe. Facing voter displeasure in Germany Merkel stalled in the hope of delaying adecision till after a regional election in Germay on May 9. In the process Merkel turned a smaller crisis in Greece into a crisis facing many countries in Europe including Spain, Portugal and Italy, and a crisis for the euro currency. French member of Parliament Juvin, told the French press: "are they waiting for the collapse of the euro?" One sticking point is that the Lisbon Treaty has no provisions for coordinating fiscal policies, and Germany did not insist earlier on oversight of Greek statistics which were generally known to be false since the 1990's. Another French member of the European Parliament, Le Grip, insisted on the need for a new European economic government, and the creation of new institutional responsibilites. The problem lies in the feeling in countries like Germany not to cede sovereignty on economic matters to a European economic body. ...