Randomly Noted

Ed Whitacre has decided to be GM’s permanent CEO, in addition to serving as its Chairman. Can he do for GM what Alan Mulally did for Ford? WSJ.com’s Deal Journal blog observes that having the same guy serve as CEO and Chairman is generally frowned on in corporate governance circles. Ironically, it was GM itself which advocated splitting the Chairman’s role from that of CEO – but that was in the early 1990s, when the auto maker’s straits weren’t quite as dire as they are now. Whitacre and his team must move fast to extricate GM from the U.S. government’s grip by making profitable cars people want to buy. If I were advising Whitacre, I’d tell him to follow Mulally’s lead and continue to slim down GM’s array of brands. The brilliance of Mulally’s Ford is it’s focused and disciplined, both internally and in the public mind. One quick step Whitacre could take is to kill the Buick brand – except in China, where it’s GM’s dominant marque. In the U.S., Buick’s musty image serves only to confuse potential customers. Whitacre should also fold the GMC brand into Chevrolet. GM’s product line-up in the American market should be trimmed to a Mulally-esque duo: Chevrolet for mainstream vehicles (cars and light trucks) and Cadillac (upscale vehicles.) “We have a lot of work to do everywhere, be it purchasing or development or quality,” Whitacre told a press conference this morning. Indeed.