As much as the General Motors Co. has toned up, CEO Dan Akerson and his lieutenants at the "new" GM say that they keep running into ghosts of the old GM that tumbled into bankruptcy in 2009, the wall Street Journal reported today. The global giant still has fragmented manufacturing operations that fail to capitalize on its global reach, and an antiquated system of financial accounting and internal scorekeeping reinforces divisions that rivals have successfully bridged. The famously slow GM bureaucracy—that 1980s-era CEO Roger B. Smith dubbed the "frozen middle"—lives on. Executives in Detroit say they face pushback from middle managers on decisions about everything from engines to pensions to office furniture. "The good thing about our bankruptcy is that it took only 39 days," said Akerson. "The bad news is that bankruptcy took only 39 days. If we had been there longer, people would have asked these questions and looked at these things." Akerson and his team—including product chief Mary Barra, North America chief Mark Reuss and marketing chief Joel Ewanick—cite progress in solving long-standing problems and say they have a vision in place for a more cohesive GM. But they acknowledge that communicating that vision and steering GM's bureaucracy toward it have proven more difficult than they expected.
