There was an intereresting read on GM's failure on the smh website I came across
here
``Toyota is built on trial and error, on admitting you don't know the future and that you have to experiment,'' Shook said. ``At GM, they say, `I'm senior management. There's a right answer, and I'm supposed to know it.' This makes it harder to try things.''
`Increasing certitude'
So while Toyota assumed it must continuously adapt if it wanted to succeed in the US, Shook says, GM believed it would forever be the market leader. Its managers brought Toyota's manufacturing methods from Fremont to Detroit. They couldn't duplicate Toyota's zen: question everything.
Wagoner, a 31-year GM veteran, was the embodiment of its culture, an apostle of incremental change. Exciting as a Saturn, quotable as an owner's manual, the one-time Duke University basketball player exuded quiet confidence about GM's future.
``I know that things will turn around,'' he told Fortune magazine in February 2006, after problems erupted at the automaker. The magazine concluded in a cover story that ``the evidence points, with increasing certitude, to bankruptcy.''