Calamity Be Damned: GM Gussies Up for Centennial Date
August 05, 2008
By Dale Buss
Its market share is near historic lows. Its stock price recently hit an abyss unvisited in more than a half-century. The CEO just announced yet another 20 percent cut in white-collar expenses now, to follow what already has been a few years of profuse bleeding. The dividend is gone, and some on Wall Street are predicting bankruptcy by 2010.
So how are General Motors and its employees supposed to celebrate the company's centennial on September 16 with anything other than inner angst and a stiff upper lip? GM's woes don't exactly create a formula that shouts, "Whoopee! Let's party like it's 1999!"
It's the job of folks like Juli Huston-Rough to give them a reason, and even she doesn't seem so sure. "It's a matter of putting your head down and doing your job and thinking positive, day in and day out," said the communications manager for GMnext, the corporate name for GM's hundredth-anniversary celebration. "We're focusing on our direction for the future and feeling good about what's in store." Cresting Celebration
Of course, even with GM reeling and the rest of the U.S. auto industry in unprecedented disarray thanks to $4-a-gallon gasoline and America's economic funk, Huston-Rough and her colleagues still must purport that there's something worth celebrating. And they've only got several weeks to convince everyone else.
So now GMnext is kicking into high gear, as it were. The company plans to launch a month-long schedule of commemoration and anticipation that will culminate in a week-long global celebration in September to be called GMnext Days.
In the United States, GMnext will be a huge presence at the Woodward Dream Cruise in metro Detroit on the weekend of August 16, where hundreds of thousands of auto buffs from around the world converge every year.
On the same weekend across the country, GM will resurrect Motorama, a showcase of concept dream cars that traveled the country from 1949 through 1960, for the 2008 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in California. The event will feature a collection of iconic vehicles showcased together for the first time. They include the first-ever concept car from GM, the Buick Y-Job, along with a host of Buick Wildcats, Pontiac Firebirds and Chevrolet Corvettes.
"We're doing some things around employee enthusiasm," Huston-Rough said. "Not just
heritage and muscle cars and history, but forward thinking about where GM will be going."
GM also will be concluding its GMnext Plug In "tour" of global music festivals, which features online interviews by Kyle Gass of the band Tenacious D, whose members include actor Jack Black.
Global Affair
GMnext already staged its biggest European celebration in May, with a two-day meeting in Cologne, Germany, that drew 6,500 people, mostly GM dealers from across the continent, as well as CEO Rick Wagoner and many other top executives. Logistics involved 89 planes, 130 buses and 120 hotels.
Invitations, flags, decorations, letterheads and everything else bore the GMnext logo. "We used GMnext as the communications hook for the whole event," said Alain Visser, chief marketing officer of GM of Europe, who ran the affair.
But the Cologne meetings amounted to far more than just corporate ego-stroking, Visser said. "We wanted to show dealers our strategy," he explained. "We went through our plans for the future brand by brand and included some pretty confidential reveals and disclosures about future products."
For example, for the first time, dealers saw the new Opel Insignia and Vauxhall Insignia, which comprise a new premium-small-car platform that will be launched around the end of this year in Germany and throughout Europe next year. And GM showed off its technological answers to European environmental challenges including anticipated carbon-dioxide taxation in several countries.
In the Asia-Pacific region, many GM executives have used GMnext internally as a catalyst for "discussion about the company and the significance of 100 years," said Jeffrey Kimpan, vice president of human resources for the region.
They've also used it externally. "GM, particularly in China, has a terrific brand image, and I think '100 years' contributes to that and to our presence in China," Kimpan said.
Future-Focused
In any event, GM has been insistent about using the occasion as a platform for pointing to the future rather than simply revisiting the company's mostly glorious past -- thus the moniker GMnext. And to a great degree, GMnext's organizers have succeeded.
For example, they set up a separate GMnext web site that has focused on the company's cutting-edge technologies, its green efforts and the company's broad "reach." It has bristled with informative and informal chats with dozens of GM executives and managers from around the world and also has featured the video stories of many rank-and-file GMers.
And in January, GM designated Visser, Kimpan and about 20 others as "future leaders" of the company -- from various functions and at various levels around the world -- and has highlighted them through GMnext activities including Web chats.
"It's been exciting to see how folks across the globe are embracing the GMnext philosophy and applying it to what's appropriate for their culture and their business," Huston-Rough said. "It's a forward-looking and optimistic spirit that's really refreshing."
On the other hand, the company's global exposure also is providing reminders that GM employees shouldn't get over-excited -- even about a centennial. "It's a big deal to us," said Kimpan. "But here, people think in terms of dynasties that last centuries."
Photos by GM
1 - GM's Australian-designed Holden Efijy participates in the 2007 Woodward Dream Cruise in Detroit
2 - The 1955 Motorama was one of the traveling Dream Car showcases GM sponsored between 1949 and 1960.
3 - Singer Kyle Gass performs at the GMnext-sponsored Rothbury, Michigan, music festival. GM sponsored other such festivals around the globe.
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