October 21, 2009  - Steve Rattner, the head of President Obama’s car czar team and the former head of the Quadrangle Group, has written a long article in Fortune Magazine (“The auto bailout: How we did it”) where he recaps how he and his team navigated GM and Chrysler through ultra fast bankruptcies. Mr. Rattner is particularly critical of the management team at GM (arrogance, private elevators and power point presentations were all in attendance).  Here are a few quotes from the article and the link to the full Fortune piece is at the end.

“Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.

For example, under the previous administration's loan agreements, Treasury was to approve every GM transaction of more than $100 million that was outside of the normal course. From my first day at Treasury, PowerPoint decks would arrive from GM (we quickly concluded that no decision seemed to be made at GM without one) requesting approvals. We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify these expenditures.”

The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

CEO Rick Wagoner and his team seemed to believe that virtually all of their problems could be laid at the feet of some combination of the financial crisis, oil prices, the yen-dollar exchange rate, and the UAW. It seemed completely obvious to us that any management team that had burned through $21 billion of cash in a year and another $13 billion in the first quarter of 2009 could not be allowed to continue.

Click HERE for the full article from Fortune Magazine.