My Years with General Motors

Archive

https://archive.org/details/myyearswithgener0000unse/page/n26/mode/1up?view=theater

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• 150 - transformation - installments, trade-in, closed body, annual model.
• Before 1908 - class market. To 1925 - mass market. Then GM era - mass-class market - mass market with better quality
• Financial control reduced need for control from the top
• Comptroler of division was responsible to org as well
• Bottom line - worker-manager relationship is adversarial. This shit creates inequality, imbalance, dead end jobs. Get rid of 'investors', create lifelong learning, make self-realization replace ROI- or rather Integrated ROI which is general happiness. This would also solve authoritarianism/dictatorship as enlightened individuals would not trade with mass murderers.
• 143 objective of data: to enable openminded communication and objective consideration of facts
• 141 - return attainable in the overall amerket - 'return attainable'
• Controls- ROI is key. Controls: appropriations, cash, inventory, production. Controls are: cost, price, volume, returns
• Al this forecasting bullshit is just an artifact of products that have a shirt lifetime. Is can be fixed with lifetime design.
• 137 continuous improvement - critical fa for that can stimulate demand regardless of outside factors
• Calculated graphs of cash month ahead, and checked divergence
• Cash between divisions was handled with a corporate Clearinghouse using certificates
• Cash control - depository account over which divisions did not control corporate withdrawals
• 121 manual for capital appropriations/expenditures
• 119 had to curtail excessive spending of divisions by responsible oversight
• 116 coordinated financial controls
• Established protocols, such as engine testing. For us it's a transparent label with everything on it.
• 107. Nobody cooperates. They tried collaborative engineering. Etwee. Divisions. To me that is a lack of standards or common vision.
• Point - effective distinction between central and divisional engineering efforts
• 71 - revolutionary car. Mr. Kettering the engineer superstar failed to deliver. Nobody even understood what he was doing. If it can't be understood, no point - one needs a team and better get buy-in. If the c suite could think critically, or Kettering could communicate clearly - this would all be solved. All this smacks of reinvent ting the wheel, many ead ends, snail like progress of non- collaborative development

K3

• Price bracket product strategy - such that it would borrow from brackets below and a ove
• Just matching the competition not exceeding eliminates performance risk
• Companies compete in broad policy and specific product
• P64 For low cost car, modeled the org before building the org. That is OSE style.
• Limit number of direct reports to CEO to let CEO focus on broad policy
• Interdivision sales - cost plus. For OSE - cost is a fraction, so maybe value-share 50/50 on the benefit?

Chapter 1

• P17 -Duryea was the first consumer gasoline car company in the USA [1]
• Mr Durant could create but not administer

Intro

• A distinction should be made between expansion, and the organization needed to support it
• Sometimes need to build parts of org around some individuals?
• Design org to be objective, not subject to personalities
• No org is sounder than the men who run it
• Centralized in policy and decent is administration
• Intro p22 -Competition for survival as greatest incentive. Ie, getting your fucking ass kicked as an incentive? How about constructive incentives?

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0385042353/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_top?

• Read some of the reviews to see if it's worth it
• First long review shows that book didn't cover production for the nazis in WW2. Details!
• Tanks were welded in a merry-go-round system that required learning only one simple weld rather than full scale training
• Great book on scarcity economics (competition) and Gayes' pick if you were to read only one biz book