GM Centennial: Focus on Future While Nodding to Glorious Past
January 03, 2008

By Dale Buss

When General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner began an online chat today at 10:07 a.m. with members of the worldwide automotive news media, he formally kicked off a corporate centennial celebration that will culminate with a huge Sept. 16 observation of exactly one official century of existence for GM.

But in his chat, Wagoner didn’t focus on The General’s glorious history as the globe’s largest and most accomplished automaker. Rather, he talked up the company’s future, from its plans to boost Daewoo, its Korean affiliate, to the possibilities for producing the Volt, GM’s plug-in hybrid vehicle that so far exists only in prototype.

Wagoner’s thrust was purposeful, because the future will be the focus of the entire centennial celebration that the company is calling GMNext. About 85% of GMNext activities and resources will be devoted to projecting GM’s second century and only about 15% to reveling in its first hundred years.

"The future is most relevant to GM,” said Scot Keller, GM’s staff director of corporate brand communications. “Also, even for people who were part of the company’s past, they have a big appetite to hear about the future.”

Christopher Barger, GM’s director of global communications technology, said that the company batted around “a lot of ideas on how to celebrate. But we decided to look forward instead of back because the industry is entering a period of fundamental and probably sometimes disruptive change.”

Identifying Future Leaders?

Perhaps the most important illustration of the future emphasis of GMNext is the prominent roles that are being played in it by 30 GM executives and managers other than Wagoner. From the moment Wagoner began his chat on Thursday [January 3] through the next 24 hours, each of these “future leaders” of the company was scheduled to conduct his or her own online chat. They’ll also be featured in GMNext online videos and write blogs during the length of the celebration.

These up-and-comers range from Sheila Jain Sarver, director of engineering and operations at GM’s technical center in Bangalore, India, to Michael Simcoe, executive director of exterior design for North America; from Henrique Pereira, powertrain product manager in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Rita Forst, executive director of GM’s European powertrain engineering, in Turin, Italy.

Their views about GM and its prospects were significant enough. But more than that, GM’s willingness to publicly highlight such a broad swath of its next generation of leadership -- and expose the 30 to media questions and other requirements of GMNext -– is both an interesting twist for a relatively closed-mouthed culture and a strong indicator of the confidence that corporate leadership actually feels about the company’s future.

“It’s somewhat speculative,” Barger admitted. Keller said GM identified the 30 by looking at “who’s doing good stuff” in particular areas, who had good reputations within regional operations, and who “can speak to what’s interesting to our audience.”

Yet Barger and Keller insisted that the 30 leaders are more important for what they indicate about GM’s status and near-term future than as the subjects of long-term career handicapping.

“These aren’t people who’ve been anointed to be the next uber executives,” Keller noted. “Every one of them is running a big piece of business that is impressive in its own right for their age and its scope. They are magnificent representations of how [GM] is operating.”

Also, GM selected the 30 individuals partly on the basis of their communications skills per se. “The objective of changing people’s perceptions of the company is important not only in the consumer space but also in the employee space,” Keller said.

And, said Barger, GM expects some other “really smart people to emerge” as GMNext unfolds “that hadn’t been tagged in the past. They’ll come out and have really good ideas and contribute to the conversation, and people in the company will say, ‘We need to pay attention to these other very smart people too.’”

Unprecedented Openness

In any event, GMNext is exposing the company and its employees to external appreciation – and inspection – more than anything the company ever has done.

GMNext plans to highlight the company’s future strategic, product and public-policy priorities in five areas: design, especially in concept products; technology, emphasizing safety and convenience features in the pipeline; “green” initiatives; ideas that are emerging from GM that will shape the future of the company and the industry; and “reach,” which Keller called “the good side of being big.”

“These are issues tied to what consumers are telling us is important to them,” Keller explained.

GMNext’s product track, for example, will include something GM is calling Global Concepts 360x365 – meaning a nonstop, all-around look at what the company will be producing in the future, what Keller called “a digital expansion of auto shows.” This aspect of the celebration will include online peeks at GM’s design studios and “video diaries” that will be posted by designers as well as “virtual scrums” in which GM executives discuss newly revealed future products with journalists and consumers online.

Music will be a major part of the celebration’s outreach to younger audiences. So GMNext will have a heavy “brand” presence at rock festivals from spring through fall that attract from 60,000 to 130,000 fans each in “key global growth markets,” Keller said.

On September 16 – the 100th anniversary of GM’s incorporation – GMNext will stage a one-hour live global broadcast to be hosted by Wagoner and the 30 “future leaders” at the company’s Renaissance Center headquarters in Detroit. Among other things, it will be available unencrypted online.

Internal Audiences

Just as important as showing off what GM has in the pipeline to global automotive consumers, GMNext also is broadly aimed at persuading the company’s own employees how great its future will be. “Attraction and retention of talent is an important issue to us,” Keller said. Providing for and encouraging wide employee participation in GMNext, he added, is one major way for the celebration to boost that imperative.

One of GMNext’s major features, for example, will be Generations of GM Wiki, an “online history book” of the company to which employees and retirees will be able to contribute. It will launch in March. GM decided that the idea of commissioning an official history book was “outdated,” Keller said, “and it wouldn’t capture the voices inside the company. The Wiki site “will go live to the world as a living, breathing history book of GM.”

Also, a web page devoted to GM’s “reach” will discuss its impact on society and GM stances on current issues and allow visitors to contribute their own content.

“It will be a very social page,” Keller said. “But it will be a moderated site that we check weekly.” As long as a post isn’t “vulgar” or “inflammatory,” he said, it will be allowed. He added that such elements will “help humanize the company and get people to dialog with us – not that they should agree with everything that we say.”

In general, Barger said it’s crucial for GMNext to rely heavily on digital media. “The things that we’re doing next, and changes the industry is going through, are happening at the same time as a really big change in how people are acquiring information,” he said. “So we want to marry the two of them. If we did it solely through old-school methods of communicating – through channels that a lot of Gen X and Gen Y people don’t pay attention to – we’d be missing the boat. We have to go where audiences and communications of the future are.”

Pedestals for Product Brands

There is a danger in how GMNext will be going about celebrating corporate accomplishments: People around the world don’t buy “GM” vehicles but, rather, shop their products as brands ranging from Chevrolet in the United States to Opel in Germany to Holden in Australia. “This will be one of their big challenges,” said a marketing executive of a rival automaker.

But GM executives insisted that they will avoid such a problem. “We recognize that the importance of the GM brand [per se] differs around the world,” Keller said. “And while this is a corporate milestone, it’s really going to be about story-telling through our brands and technology and people who run the businesses. It’s not the parent having a birthday so that the kids are just invited; rather, it’s about what’s good in this company, and a significant amount of that lives and breathes through our brands.”

Of course, it was easier to tie Ford’s celebration of its 100th anniversary in 2003 directly to the company’s products and brands, because the Ford brand is its biggest. But nevertheless, some Ford insiders said that the company didn’t do a good enough job of tapping into the passions of its millions of Ford brand and product enthusiasts around the world. (Ford, by the way, will get one chance to rectify that shortcoming as it celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Model T this year.)

In putting together GMNext, GM executives “did a fair amount of benchmarking” of significant celebrations by other major U.S. industrial companies and brands. They came away impressed by efforts “that really had a business objective behind what they were doing,” Keller said. “So that emerged as a meaningful priority.”

GMNext is “more of a reputation play” than most other companies have made their centennials or 50-year anniversaries, he continued. “There are some emerging markets that don’t know us as well as places in the U.S. market where we’re not as relevant as in the past. So at the core [of GMNext] is talking with new people about things that hopefully will put us on their radar screen.”

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