Essay on Gm Lit Review

Submitted By Anuktha1
Words: 1533
Pages: 7

INTRODUCTION
Change is a consistent phenomenon in every aspect of a human life. It can be personal or professional and is inevitable. Change could be an argument for some people and they wouldn’t know how to deal with it. Changes in organisation can also be stressful because they need to accommodate the changes without affecting the performance of the employees which depends on the performance of the organisation as a whole. Globalisation has been one of the major issues for changes in the organisations. This integration of products, views/ ideas and the working culture in general is causing the change.
Change management concerns in creating a projected methodology on how to manage change in our personal lives or organisation. In order to manage change
 An understanding that change is something that never stops and that can be expected at any moment.
 Begin the process of change yourself and keep focused throughout the process.
 Expect yourself to make mistakes and critique them where required.
 Solve problems using different approaches and find out the best solution.
 Reflect upon these solutions to the ones that you might have come across previously.
Innovation is one of the processes in the development of change management. In a simplified way, it means creating something new or re-structuring something differently. But from a business perspective, it refers to actually implementing those new ideas.
This paper will utilise an American multinational corporation, General Motors (GM) as an example for organisational change management. The topics presented in this report are a brief history about GM, what caused their downfall, what they did not do and one of the major changes that took place during the reorganisation. The change procedure outlined discusses cost efficiency, limitations considering this measure and results achieved. It also mentions measures that other companies should follow to avoid GM’s doom.
Before we get to the change management procedure, a brief history of GM and what made them file for bankruptcy.

BRIEF OUTLINE AND HISTORY OF GENERAL MOTORS General Motors (GM) was founded in September 1908 at flint, Michigan. It began as a holding company for Buick which is also based in Michigan. It was the world’s largest automakers with more than 200,000 employees and doing business in more than 150 countries. By the 1920’s GM exceeded the sales of Ford, another American Motor company which led to GM being the world’s largest car manufacturer. The major success for GM was during the World War II. In 1942, more than $12 billion war material like airplanes, trucks, tanks, guns etc was provided by GM. All these accomplishments happened under the leadership of Alfred Sloan. He came up with ideas like “planned destruction” (every year there will be a change in the style of cars) and a pricing concept where the different brands would fill different alcoves and also not compete with each other (Corporate Information – History n.d). In the 1980’s GM started to feel the competition from the rise of Toyota, a Japanese automaker. But with the introduction of SUV in 1990, GM’s decline was interrupted as they made huge profits. After 2001, GM started to struggle with their sales and by 2005 they reported loss of more than $8 billion. Meanwhile, Toyota in 2007 took the opportunity and outranked GM in becoming the world’s largest automaker (Hawkes, S 2007). Before declaring bankruptcy in 2009, GM received loans from the US and Canadian government in order to try and survive. Yet they couldn’t afloat which led to the fourth largest bankruptcy in the history of American economy.
WHAT WENT WRONG? The company assuming that people would always opt to buy bigger, expensive and powerful cars was an inevitable mistake. They did not change their business model presuming that nobody will stand up as a competitor. They followed a 7-year planning cycle for a new design and introduction of a car. They were absolutely