GM board hurries toward hazy future

[Bruce Nunnally]

Daniel Howes at the Detroit News has a thoughtful piece about the GM Board here:

http://www.detnews.com/article/20091202/OP...ard-hazy-future

In the end, it wasn't about Fritz Henderson. It was about a new board of hotshot directors excising the last vestige of Old GM atop the automaker.

Henderson, pressed into the CEO's job after President Barack Obama's auto task force fired Rick Wagoner last March, is unceremoniously out, Chairman Ed Whitacre is in and the federal government's largest industrial holding is in the unenviable position of continuing a transformation while looking for the two most important jobs in all of GM -- a CEO and a CFO.

Why now? Because Henderson could never meet the expectations of the new directors, on the job little more than three months. He and his team couldn't move fast enough, even if they were moving faster than any team in GM history (or the history of the Detroit auto industry). He and his team couldn't stanch the market share loss fast enough; they couldn't change the culture fast enough; they couldn't close deals to sell assets fast enough.