Space oddity - in the long run we're all dead

I have less sympathy for GM than for Blacks. Some crimes of strategy are less forgivable than others. The latest part of GM to break is Saturn which is closing down. My original impression of Saturn was formed not as a car buyer, but as a marketing case study - an example of a skunkworks project, which were rather trendy at the time (10+ years ago). Turns out not to have been such a smart idea in this case since not only were the cars not awfully good, they sold at a loss.

There's a very simple lesson here. It may (or may not) be smart to isolate little groups of innovators in order to break the corporate cultural assumptions about what might or should be done. The jury's out, but my judgement tells me there are times this is very smart indeed. What is clearly - inexcusably - dumb is to build a completely parallel production capability (so sacrificing all your efficiencies of scale), and to stick the new products out in a separate brand so that if there's any equity to be gained, you fail to capture it where you need it. The threat from Japan was to GM itself. A retailation brand (which is all Saturn was) was doomed. The arrival of Japanese manufacturers was the first big unheeded warning that the whole of Detroit needed to revamp its capabilities and its offer.

This mistake took so long to play out that Roger Smith, on whose watch it happened, didn't live to see the wheels finally come off. A small personal mercy. I hope I die too, before my mistakes get found out.