Top GM Boss Gets His Walking Papers, While Top Gear Sells Me On Ford

I don’t mean to kick a man when he’s down but when you lose billions of dollars, your company’s share price drops from $70 to $4, and lose market share all on your watch– its time to go.  Unfortunately, the talking heads on CNBC are actually debating whether or not Rick Wagoner deserved to be forced out.  Obviously, nobody on that panel was a GM shareholder.  Can someone out there please tell me when Americans decided that responsibility is a relative concept, one that applies in some circumstances and not to all people at all times.

For some reason, people can draw a clear line between success and failure in sports.  When a team fails to perform, the owner fires coaches and cuts players. There might be some out cry from the fans, but the owners look at the balance sheet, the win-loss records, the stats and make decision.  This is why Terrell Owens will be suiting up as a Buffalo Bill and why Herman Edwards, Mike Shanahan, and Jon Gruden won’t be pacing the sidelines this fall.  There are exceptions to this, the continued mediocrity of the NBA’s New York Knicks and the eight year torture (I meant to say tenure) of ex-Detroit Lions President/General Manager Matt Millen, who got the team a 31-97 record.

In most instances, if you succeed on the field you are retained and you are paid.  Somehow in boardrooms in this nation that idea has gone out the window.  Performance no longer matters, its who has better set of lawyers that negotiated a “deal”. If you are not a high ranking executive, then you are fearful that no matter how hard you work, that management will one day “curtail redundancies in the human resources area” and you will be out on the street.  There is no golden parachute for you.  For that matter, no golden coffin either.  That’s right some of these people have death benefits that are paid to their families.  This is not personal life insurance, the company pays the family.  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Companies defend the practice as an appropriate way to take care of an executive’s family after an unexpected death. “Golden coffins are justifiable in some situations,” such as following the demise of a relatively new CEO who uprooted family members to join the concern, says John Olson, a corporate board adviser and senior partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington. Other legal experts say management death benefits often are a form of deferred compensation, structured partly for estate-planning or tax reasons.

I’ve digressed.  I don’t know if Wagoner had a golden coffin.  According to reports he won’t be getting a large exit package.  My beef with with Wagoner and GM management as a whole can be summed up in three points:

(1) What about Tiger Woods sinking a putt on the 16th green at Doral is going to make me want to buy a Buick Enclave?

(2) In a dimly lit parking lot from 30 yards away, can anyone really tell the difference between a Cadallic Escalade, GMC Yukon Denali, Chevy Tahoe, and a Chevy Suburban?  They all have V8 engines, you can get AWD on all of them, ok the interiors should be nicer in the Cadallic– why sell me the same SUV again and again?  Why would I pay $20,000 more for body molding, chrome, and a badge?

(3) Back to the celebrity thing, Howie Long!?  This is supposed to sell me?  Why not show how good your car is?  Dodge, Ford, and Toyota seem to get it, with crazy truck pulls and explosions.  GM’s idea of selling a truck has been to cue the Steve Miller Band.  The British show Top Gear does a much better job of selling cars than any Super Bowl ad or celebrity ever could.  Check out these two clips from a “road test” of the Ford Fiesta.  Once is of a race between the Fiesta and a Corvette in a shopping mall and the other is how well the Fiesta can be used as a beach assault craft when its full of marines.