I read this guy every week. He's pretty smart and doesn't really appear to have any bias concerning GM or Chrysler
Detroit. The swirling maelstrom of conjecture, rumor and fabrication that’s enveloping the Motor City (aka The Land of Not Good) right now concerning GM and Chrysler has spun completely out of control. So much has been said by so many people who know so little about what’s going on, that it’s truly breathtaking to contemplate. As a matter of fact, I have never seen anything like it in all my years in this business.
With that in mind then, I thought it would be good idea to take a deep breath and talk about what we know first, before we venture into how any future scenarios might play out.
The Cerberus Fiasco.
First of all, as I’ve been warning for quite some time, the Cerberus “miracle” planned for the resurrection of Chrysler was a flat-out disaster waiting to happen. And unfortunately for the people at Chrysler, my prediction is unfolding as you read this. That Cerberus was completely out of their league and unencumbered with the first shred of knowledge or expertise required to turn around a flailing, ailing and deflating American automotive icon is a known fact.
And on top of that, the unbridled hubris that they brought to the table, which deluded them into thinking that they actually could venture into one of the most challenging businesses in the world - at exactly the most crucial juncture in American automotive history - and emerge with a nice big payday in a couple of years, is beyond comprehension.
That Cerberus assembled a “dream team” (at least in their estimation) consisting of Bob Nardelli - a man who was such an abject failure at Home Depot that the company has taken years to recover - and Jim Press, the architect of the modern miracle that is Toyota in the United States today, and “assumed” that they could just throw a switch and it would all be good, makes me question the sanity of the powers that be at Cerberus.
That the Cerberus brain trust was that out of touch and that detached from the reality of the situation is simply scary. There’s really no other word for it. Needless to say, the fact that things didn’t go swimmingly well for the Cerberus “dream team” was no surprise in the least. Assembling a team of alleged all-stars on paper doesn’t automatically translate into a winning performance, and Cerberus proved that timeless adage once again, but with dramatically painful consequences unique to its self-inflicted predicament.
You can read the rest of it
here
