My initials are GM and it's no accident. I've worn my father's dealership ring for more than 30 years and I've signed his insistence that I be named after the car company on every legal document requiring my signature since I was 18.
"You can call him what you want but make sure his initials are GM," he told my mother at the birth of his only child. It was a piece of family history that I kept hidden until after my father died and I decided that it could have been worse. He might have worked for Ford and I could have been named Edsel.
I was born in 1954 during the reign of (King) Harlow Curtice, CEO of GM, whose hubris seemed grounded enough at the time when he said, "GM has no bad years, only good years and better years." How the mighty did fall. It's a good thing that both Mr. Curtice and my father are dead, as surely the sight of GM's leadership pleading for taxpayer assistance a year and a half ago would have killed them.
The Fowlie auto empire ended years ago in Alberta, but when I was growing up, Flint, Mich., was Mecca and General Motors was the source of all that was good. Buick stood for sensibility, Cadillac meant you had made it and a Chevy Corvette was for those with too much money and testosterone.
I hold a degree from the London School of Economics but remain a reluctant economist at best. When you spend your earliest years playing buy and sell on a car lot and learning to count by filing car-part serial numbers, it's natural to assume you've mastered the basics of the dismal science before you're old enough to drive.
Give the customer what they want with your respect and they'll always come back. Manage the inventory levels right and the interest charges will take care of themselves. Treat your staff with dignity and they'll reward you with innovation. These are the basic tenets of small business in Canada and they once epitomized GM's vision. To quote former company president Charles Wilson, "what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." At least Eisenhower agreed with him - he appointed him secretary of defence. But that's another story.
GM's decline from its apogee of greatness to the point where it needed U.S. taxpayers' money and a public scolding by President Barack Obama as car-dealer-in-chief to deal with its underlying corporate mess has mirrored my own maturity and I suppose inevitable decline. The company faced bankruptcy the same month I turned 55.
But like any crisis - personal or professional - it ushers in a period of great regret and/or great resolve. GM, with a $50-billion investment by the U.S. government, was fortunate enough to be given the later option. It hived off the bad assets, kept those bits with promise and began to reorganize itself into a newer, humbler, more environmentally and customer-friendly corporate citizen.
GM's first post-bankruptcy stock offering this week appears to mark a restoration of some confidence in the company. It was the largest initial offering in U.S. history and it raised $23.1-billion through its listing on the New York and Toronto exchanges. A more than decent first start, although it will need to continue to generate market enthusiasm if it hopes to pay back the remaining $26.9-billion it owes the U.S. government.
GM, which a year and a half ago was seen as bloated and unable to compete with more efficient overseas companies, has turned around its operations by applying the same economic efficiency measures it used after Canada's McLaughlin Motor Car Co. partnered with the Buick Motor Co. in 1907. That alliance would go on to become the General Motors Holding Co. The recent boom in Ford share prices certainly didn't hurt GM nor did the Toyota safety fiasco that turned the consumers' attitude away from the long-held opinion that anything built in Oshawa or Ohio could ever compete with an Okinawa import.
While my father's wheels would have spun out of control had he been alive to see GM go cap in hand to the government only to earn the derisive name Government Motors, he would be equally pleased by the fact that GM's mid-life crisis seems to have resulted in enough traction to pull itself out of this rut, even if a few potholes remain on the road ahead. Still, demand from investors for the initial public offering was so great during a recent company stock promotion road show that both the government and the United Auto Workers union chose to sell significantly more of their shares than they'd planned.
As for my own GM rebirth. I've stopped wearing my father's dealership ring crest side down and I will take the opportunity to do a little personal restructuring of my own. After all. Nothing down. No interest. No sweat.