General Motors Co. chairman and CEO Dan Akerson has vowed to end company "fiefdoms" as he remakes the automaker's global structure.
"We're a global company that operates as small, little fiefdoms. That's got to stop," Akerson told employees during a recent global town hall meeting. "That contributes to this silo effect or perception."
GM is reshaping the company's long-entrenched focus on regions — North America, Europe and International Operations — dubbed "legal entities" by Akerson. Instead, he wants a structure that allows GM to take advantage of global scale and authority, and many operations would be more centralized, such as marketing, purchasing and global development.
And the CEO is blunt about the issues facing GM.
The company needs a new information technology system — the existing one is so bad the automaker, until six months ago, had lost track of some of its 200,000 employees worldwide.
"We didn't know what they were doing," Akerson said.
Read Article