The Midwest Auto OEM Sr. Leaders (Directors and above) desire to be just like Silicon Valley tech companies with their fast moving mindset and goals for huge profit margins. Everything they are changing is because they are in a panic mode to survive. I don't blame them given emerging competitors threat from various places. The problem we have on hand is: 1) the culture was never molded like this, so it's extremely hard to change that for a company this size, 2) a whole lot of under-qualified and overpaid folks can be found everywhere from top to bottom. Historically speaking, we were never staffed to be a SW company. Most of the engineers are nothing but paperwork engineers. Do you really expect them to start performing all of a sudden when that hasn't been the expectations for so many years? 3) A vast majority of Sr. Leaders have never really done any hands on technical work, so they are not the right fit to lead this new world of SW focused products. They lack vision and strategy. A good technical guy can run circles around them and they wouldn't know what to do with it because these leaders lack knowledge and experience. They are like monkeys pointing at something and saying "I want that. How long will it take and give me status on a regular basis?" A $1M salary to just do that? Do you really expect these Sr. leaders to change the culture and bring innovation when most of them got promoted through connections and not their capabilities? We want accomplished leaders who workers will respect and will support their vision. GM can easily get rid of 2-3 layers of current leaderships and still be okay, if not better. This way they can save additional $1B and put it in their piggy bank instead of laying off folks who are actually doing the work as told.
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Gm is dead since the culture of lots of top heavy dead weight cannot be cured. Top brass will be fine when they bail with golden parachutes everyone else is screwed. nobody in house has skill all outsources to suppliers that have computer modules that are not compatible with each other. A longshot to get vertical integration and get it all working. Just give up already and license a platform from an entity that has it all figured out. in the near future ford will be doing this licensing software etc from tesla to survive.
If you have a 6 month project you can't spend 4 months of it waiting for management approvals to get the go ahead.
Are they trying to GM into Tesla?
mid-level managers are still decent workers and knowledgeable in their area. They are actually in the worst position if you ask me taking cr-p from the top while keeping their employees motivated. It's the leaders above them that has to go. They are not adding any value.
Well that sounds like an argument for getting rid of a bunch of managers.
A lot of them insist on being in the decision loop, but they won't make a decision or just slow everything down. Probably in fear of making a bad decision, they make no decision.
If you're a manager, making decisions is your only job. If you can't do it, you should leave.
There's a lot of bureaucracy that not only slow things down, but ki-ls it. People get tired of figuring out how to get work done because there are too many cooks in the kitchen and they are all lost in a maze. Now, everyone is just trying to deflect work saying they don't have resources because no one wants to go through this headache and leadership has no idea how to solve this mess.
That's just pre-Mott outsourcing of all IT.
It didn't work too well, which is why they insourced.
Where’s the chaos?
The existing staff isn’t talented or motivated enough to create “software focused projects”. This was always done by suppliers in the past so why are people surprised?
The obvious solution is to cut them all and let the suppliers bid on contracts.
This is 100% inevitable, even if the dolts in management need more failure to prove it out.
Hate me, downvote this post. It does not matter. You know what I’m saying is true.
Sounds like justification for massive layoffs and a total restaffing.