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Empty tables, once full of lifetime GM executives

General Motors is experiencing a severe personnel crisis after promoting, firing, and forcing into retirement the majority of its lifetime executives. The firm, which is well known for promoting from within to ensure that no outside ideas contaminate the corporate culture, may have no choice but to look outside its offices as they continue to promote and fire executives in the coming months.

With all this turnover, GM warns that it may have only a few months’ worth of executives left. “At the rate we’re promoting and firing, I worry that we will need a fresh infusion of executives by May,” said Mark Reuss, President of GM North America, who was appointed on December 4, 2009. Reuss continued “At that point, we’re going to need to look outside the GM organization. The risk is that people could come in with new ideas and strategies that are totally contrary to the ones that has kept GM successful and profitable over the past 60 years.”

But this process may have already begun. This past week, General Motors hired Microsoft’s former CFO, Chris Liddell, to be its own CFO. “We found that the Microsoft executives bring many of the same characteristics we love in our GM lifers: dedication to quality, a willingness to listen to customer views, and never feeling complacent with success,” said a GM spokesman.

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