Following up on flexibility

This is an interesting speech made on August 4, 2004, which may bear reprinting.

Tom LaSorda

Chief Operating Officer, Chrysler Group

“The Fully Flexible Corporation”

I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity to discuss the state and future of our industry. Thank you for inviting me to be a part of it.

Having fairly recently moved to the COO position at the Chrysler Group, during the most ambitious year of product launches in the company’s 80-year history, I can almost understand why this session is titled, The Perfect Storm.

The environment in which we compete — at times — may seem like it was lifted from the pages of a good disaster story.

Of course, most of the time it seems more like it was lifted from the script of a really bad Hollywood disaster movie.

Remember “The Blob” (it creeps, it crawls, it eats you alive)? Or “The Towering Inferno” (one tiny spark becomes a night of blazing suspense)?

Would The Perfect Storm be a good name for a disaster movie about the automotive industry? Or might a better name be something like … Jaws?

Either way, I don’t belong to the school of thought that the North American-auto industry is being pushed to the brink of extinction by the reappearance of a Perfect Storm … or by a predator fish, for that matter.

In my mind, The Perfect Storm metaphor no longer fits the realities of our operating environment.

Take a moment to think about The Perfect Storm scenario.

A powerful confluence of unseen forces.
Leading to a moment of extreme danger.
Followed by a period of calm reflection, relief and retooling.
And then, the opportunity to do it all over again because we learned almost nothing from the experience.
Why does that scenario make me think of the Detroit Lions?

Anyway, this cycle is just too predictable to describe our operating environment.
And when was the last time any of you had a period of calm reflection?
Rather than a Perfect Storm I think our operating environment is more like a Perpetual Storm.

Both storms are deadly. But, in a Perpetual Storm, the danger is constant, as are the dangers in our business environment.

To survive — our business cultures and our processes must be equally constant.

In essence, we must operate in a state of perpetual transformation.

In this state, our people and organizations are constantly creating new sources of value from improved execution, process discipline and flexibility.

We’ve all come to understand flexibility as a manufacturing concept. And, as a manufacturing concept, it’s an important source of value.

Consider what Toyota and Honda have achieved by becoming more flexible in their plants. Also consider what the Chrysler Group has achieved with two successive breakthrough years in the Harbour Report. The story behind this success is the growing flexibility of our people, our processes and our plants.

While we’re very proud of this, we realize that to take our success to new levels requires that we take flexibility to a new level. Perhaps, even to levels we never contemplated before.

We’ve incubated the concept of flexibility on the plant floor and are using the lessons we’ve learned to create new value throughout our business.

This includes product development, procurement & supply, marketing, sales, human resources and beyond — to our suppliers, our dealers, our strategic alliances and, of course, our customers.

In effect, creating an organizational culture that is without boundaries and “fully flexible.”

The Fully Flexible Corporation, I believe, is the perfect answer to The Perpetual Storm.

The Fully Flexible Corporation operates consistently at or near world-class standards of innovation and quality.

The Fully Flexible Corporation makes transformation a core competency. Indeed, transformation is part of its formula for success. And it can create new value in any environment — value it passes directly on to customers.

It develops people who embrace change. People who are increasingly unconstrained by the approaches and processes of the past. Innovators with a nose for sources of new value.

And, because of all of this, The Fully Flexible Corporation has what it takes to meet a perpetual storm, or anything else Mother Nature or the market may throw at it.

So, let’s explore this broader vision of flexibility as an influencer of corporate transformation, and as a formula for success, using the Chrysler Group as an example.

As we do this, I also want to challenge my supplier colleagues. There are a few who are outspoken about how OEMs must step up to the challenges of global competition.

From our perspective, stepping up to the challenges of global competition actually starts with flexibility.

And the need for greater flexibility is no longer just a manufacturing concept. Nor is it solely an OEM issue. Becoming more flexible is a challenge we all must face, and we all must face this challenge together.

Our vision of flexibility places emphasis on the customer and the product. In effect, our goal is to design and build virtually anything just about anywhere, with improving speed and quality – the emphasis on efficiently maximizing innovation, design, and package selection for customers.

Contrast this with other visions of flexibility, where the process dictates design and package. With us, the systems must be flexible enough to accommodate products that address current or emerging tastes in the marketplace - and quickly.

That builds on a core strength of the Chrysler Group: breakthrough products!

Let’s investigate two powerful examples of the competitive advantage our team is creating as we become more flexible.

The first example is the development of our new minivan with the breakthrough Stow ‘n Go seating and storage system. Consider this … our team brought this product to dealer showrooms in just 18 months! This was unprecedented and demonstrates the flexibility of our entire organization.

Admittedly, we were on a dangerous path to potentially lose our leadership in the segment. So we challenged our team with a significant capital commitment — $400 million — and we asked them to sustain our lead position, a challenge that required the creation of an entirely new platform and underbody.

In fact, we were planning a whole new minivan design a few years down the road. Yet, our leadership team made the investment to bring a paradigm-changing feature to our customers even before our new vehicle hit the market.

That’s applying flexibility at the highest level…in the product plan!

This was a test of our Chrysler Development System’s ability to stimulate collaboration and innovation among all our key players — design, engineering, manufacturing and our supply base — in effect, weaving them into a fully flexible, development team, as I said, without boundaries.

Of course, this philosophy didn’t end at the development phase.

Normally, before tooling and work with suppliers begins the Manufacturing team develops and issues a document that contains build criteria. Our team developed the plans for the tub install at a local Mexican restaurant! The plans guiding our tooling and suppliers were drawn up on napkins!

Judging from the conditions of those napkins, I’d say the margaritas were especially good that day.

And there was nothing routine about this build. For instance, the team had to figure out how to install a 60-pound plastic tub, safely, and without damaging the body of the vehicle — planning and executing totally on the go.

Our new minivan is a great example of how full flexibility enhances our collaboration and speed to market. Let’s now look at an example of how our flexibility drives innovation.

As you may know, we control material costs through our Material Cost Management — or MCM — process. This process involves Engineering, Procurement & Supply and Manufacturing, which are all on a common mission during product development, and supplier selection.

The idea is to find and apply the best technology for the least cost, while achieving greater quality and value for customers.

MCM has inspired much collaboration and innovation in our company. In so doing — and here’s that Perpetual Storm I talked about — this process presents an interesting challenge, because it’s inspiring our team to out-innovate some of our suppliers.

For instance, a team of our engineers recently put aside a supplier’s design of a key component that controls fuel system vapors, and they designed and patented an alternative. The alternative exceeds regulatory standards, with reduced complexity. Translation? Better quality and less weight — at a price that’s at least 70 percent lower than the lowest supplier quote.

Here’s the part I like: When this component goes into production for the 2006 model year, we’ll realize this 70 percent savings on more than 2.8 million vehicles a year, saving more than $18 million a year!

That’s not continuous improvement. That’s breakthrough improvement. And it represents precisely the results we’ll be achieving as the Chrysler Group becomes fully flexible.

There’s more to come.

Now I ask our suppliers: As we become faster and more innovative, as we become more flexible, will you be fast enough to out-innovate us?

If not, then you’ve got some work to do.

So, we’ve seen some of the outcomes, now let’s now take this discussion to ground level, and consider the specific applications of flexibility in our company.

In our concept of flexibility, there are six identifiable applications.

The first five of these, Chaining Flex, Volume Flex, Platform/Architecture Flex, Model Mix Flex and Supplier/Component Flex, are very familiar. They are the foundation for what many among us consider flexibility.

While automakers employ them, these applications are only the start of the journey to becoming Fully Flexible.

The sixth application, Business Model Flex is a unique test of how deeply you can apply flexibility to transform your business. I’ll go through the first five quickly. Then I’ll focus on Business Model Flex.

Chaining and Volume Flex together enable us to respond to market dynamics. Chaining Flex is flexibility between plants, while Volume Flex lets you rebalance volume within or between plants.

For instance, on Chaining Flex, we build Dodge Ram trucks in three plants, our new Stow ‘n Go minivans will also soon be built in three plants (Windsor, St. Louis and, by early next year, in Graz, Austria), and we can chain volume and flex it to meet market demand.

Platform Architecture Flex includes common vehicle architectures and what we call platform flexibility – in essence, developing products off interchangeable designs.

With Model Mix Flex, our fourth application, subassemblies allow us to differentiate models, which can be derivatives.

We hope you’ve noticed that we’ve launched nine all-new products in 2004. And here you see them all.

But at the same time, we’ve brought an array of other variants and derivatives to market…products like our high-performance SRT versions of the Dodge Neon and Chrysler Crossfire, the Jeep Liberty Renegade and, soon to come, Jeep Liberty diesel and others.

And with Supplier/Component Flex, our fifth application, content also differentiates our products.

In my book, these are examples of the best possible responses to a Perpetual Storm.

Now, let’s kick it up a notch, and investigate our sixth application, Business Model Flex.

Can our organizations truly operate without boundaries…internally and externally?
Can we integrate our operations with our business partners?
And, can we use flexibility to evolve to a more high-performance business model?
I think we can, and we, and some of our suppliers, are already doing it.

There are different aspects to Business Model Flex. What I want to focus on is what we call supplier co-location, which is when suppliers essentially build and manage key manufacturing process facilities totally within a plant “footprint”, and an important outcome of supplier co-location, an idea we call Capital Spending Flex.

Yesterday, we announced our supplier co-location project in Toledo. This project is an example of Business Model Flex, where three suppliers will construct and own nearly one-million square-feet of plant space inside our Toledo North plant “footprint,” for body, paint and chassis operations. Toledo North is where we build the Jeep Liberty.

Body and paint capital investment alone is more than half of the total manufacturing investment for a major project. So, by partnering in this way, the Chrysler Group is able to optimize capital dollars for investment in future products.

That’s capital spending flexibility! That’s reinvigorating our business model!

But it’s not just our business model that’s getting a shot of new blood. For instance, consider our supplier partners who’ll manage the paint and body shops.

Our paint supplier, Durr, is a process and tooling company with competencies in paint shop operations.

However, the lifecycle for this supplier’s core products is quite long, considering that paint shops go up for 20 to 25 years, a time period in which there’s not a lot of process and tooling going on.

If you took a look at how many tooling companies went bankrupt in the Detroit area in the last few years, you’ll get a sense of the storm these companies face.

In Michigan, State labor data shows that about 34,000 tooling jobs have vanished since 1998. Cities like Grand Rapids have been hit hard.

The National Tooling & Machining Association estimates that 30 percent of the country’s toolmakers have shut their doors since 2000, and many who are still left are barely hanging on.

Due to global hyper competition, every company is reusing assets and designing processes leaner. This was inevitable. The companies that didn’t survive should’ve changed their business model.

Now Durr has an opportunity to apply its competencies to a whole new business opportunity. Now its innovation and efficiency can be a source of new and immediate value.

Isn’t it obvious Durr’s costs for design, development, and installation will be lower than what they would charge me?

Same is true for our body shop supplier, Kuka.

Kuka’s competencies are process and tooling. But guess what? Our flexibility enables us to double the life of our equipment.

So, where’s this supplier’s market going?

Like our paint shop supplier, there was a declining market for the best of Kuka’s innovation. Now they’ve got an opportunity to put their company’s innovation in the bank!

Finally, our rolling chassis supplier – Hyundai Mobis – is an expert in design and processing, quality and supply chain for these types of modules.

When you step back, Toledo was the perfect place to launch Business Model Flexibility.

Jeep Wrangler is a product with very stable volume. Plus, we were required to replace the body and paint shops anyway. And, as important, this was a great opportunity to bring benefits to a community that has been part of the Chrysler Group family for decades.

Our relationship with the UAW was important to creating this new prototype business model.

We received outstanding support from the local and state governments in Ohio.

All of these factors were key to our decision.

And, we didn’t run with this idea to the so-called “New South.”

The supplier facilities within the Toledo North plant represent, in effect, Brownfield development. Indeed, 23 of 24 Chrysler Group U.S. manufacturing facilities are Brownfield sites. We’re proud of that.

So, this was a compelling business opportunity for us, our suppliers and our communities.

But opportunities like this are only sources of new value if you’re flexible enough to “see” them, and disciplined enough to execute them.

I heard someone say recently that no matter where you live, there was never a better time than right now to be in the market for a new car or truck.

It’s been that way for a while. I suspect it will continue to be, and that’s a good thing.

However, this market isn’t giving anything up easily. Customers demand world class design and engineering, innovation and quality at competitive prices. Therein lies the challenge, or the source of our Perpetual Storm. But that’s also a good thing.

It’s a good thing because in this context, there was never a better time to be in this industry, as an OEM or a supplier, especially if you bring the right philosophy and passion to your efforts.

This includes finding comfort in a state of perpetual transformation, and having the focus and discipline to become fully flexible.

Indeed, at the Chrysler Group, despite the examples I’ve shared with you, we’re really just getting started in applying flexibility to our business. The results we’ll achieve with the products in our pipeline will be the proof in the pudding. So stay tuned.

If you’re trying to understand the pace of the auto industry today, or are too busy contemplating The Perfect Storm, my advice to you is this:

Don’t blink … move fast … and don’t try to ride out the storm, you may quickly become a casualty to innovation!
Embrace flexibility … apply it throughout your business, and challenge your key partners to do the same. If they don’t, find new partners.
Finally, as a leader, you’ll know you’re on the right path when your team is invested in the journey, and their certainty that tomorrow will not be anything like today, motivates them to higher levels of performance, greater creativity, and full flexibility.

Thank you for listening.

What happened to the November 4-5 announcement?

Rumors were flying. “There will be something BIG on November 4.” Then, “There will be something BIG on November 5.” Finally, “There will be something BIG on November 6.”

Honestly, when nothing materialized on November 4 other than a historic election that hopefully lined up a nail in the coffin of a voluntarily, fully, irrationally separated America - and by separated, I mean red and blue as much as black and white - I personally decided that the talk of November 5 and later was probably overblown. 

It turned out that GM as much as admitted to having planned to take over Chrysler. One has to wonder about that. The talks with GM turned away Carlos Ghosn, whose Nissan/Renault alliance would have made an excellent partner for Chrysler - and for Nissan and Renault. 

General Motors, at least, seemed to believe there was a deal. Now we can have our speculation about what really happened, not that we’re likely to ever know for sure.

Line One is the moderately paranoid line of thought - “just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” Perhaps Cerberus wanted GM to think they were serious, and toyed around with them to the point where GM was making long term decisions based on an acquisition - freezing future development, not making strategic decisions they really needed to make, etc. What could Cerberus gain by this?

First, GM would be so weakened by foolishly postponing key decisions (like shutting down factories and nameplates and brands) that they would eventually end up desparate to raise cash, so desparate that they’d hand over GMAC for a pittance just to get it off their books. Then Cerberus could go and get some of that free government money that your White House and Congress so kindly run off the presses for banks, and make a multi-billion-dollar killing, the kind that billionaires trust Cerberus to do. 

Alternatively, GM would weaken itself to the point where Cerberus could take them over for even less than GM is worth now, which is very little — around what Volvo was worth before Ford bought it.

Also alternatively, GM’s weakness would make government decision-makers realize that GM was about to topple, making it more likely that they would bail out Chrysler. Few outside of Auburn Hills and Allpar would argue that Chrysler deserved to be saved, but many would argue that the entire domestic industry (we’re neatly ignoring relatively-healthy Ford here, you’ll notice) needs to be saved. 

Line Two, incidentally, is what many of the industry folk (journalists excluded) would believe - namely, that they were serious about the talks, but that it all fell through when sober heads at GM realized how much it would cost to wind down key operations, to make the combined company a success. It’s not cheap to shut down a brand or a factory, and of course the fewer people you employ, the higher the pension costs are per each remaining person. Daimler never, ever, ever understood that. Chrysler needed to be kept going, investments needed to be made, simply to make sure the company didn’t shrink, because shrinking companies with large pension obligations automatically see their real labor rates skyrocket. That’s why Chrysler was so healthy in the mid to late 1990s — they were expanding while GM and Ford were shrinking, so their pension costs per active employee were lower than GM or Ford. (And no, I don’t believe it’s a great idea to go to all those people who had contracts with pensions and say, “Unions are greedy and wrong, and so we’re going to take away your pension - the one we legally and morally bound ourselves to pay.” Especially while paying the executives tens of millions of dollars a year and paying bankruptcy lawyers over $1,000 an hour.)

Line Three is similar to Line Two, but has to do with people at GM getting personally offended at the hardball extortion tactics of having GMAC essentially withdraw support for GM dealers, and striking back by canceling the deal. Executives are people and people have emotions. Alternatively, someone at GM might just have decided it should not be the end of the line for Chrysler. Or someone might have realized that 80% of mergers fail, and that this one was clearly destined not to be in the 20%.

Is there a Line Four? Perhaps it’ll make it into the comments.

Phoenix is alive. Really. Anyone listening?

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a rumor sent to us by someone who seemed authentic, describing how the Phoenix engine plant and all work around it had been dropped. Perhaps foolishly, we ran it — as a rumor, not as a fact — noting that it was a single source. In the past, we’ve never really been mis-led by such sources. This time, though, we were.

Numerous sites picked up on the rumor, and it gained a strong currency, which appears to have had repercussions on the project itself. We apologized before (and we’re doing it again) for the consequences of this article, even though it was always pegged as a rumor.

What I don’t understand, though, is why, when we ran the retraction, some of the others who picked up on the cancellation of the Phoenix didn’t seem to notice. Jim Press even directly addressed it; and while some outlets picked up on that, others didn’t. 

We’re waiting… (tap tap tap).

No big announcements, so far

Numerous sources, including Allpar, predicted a GM-Chrysler merger or takeover announcement on November 4 or November 5. Some major media sources believe this announcement will come with GM’s release of its earnings today. It is possible that an announcement was planned based on actions which have been halted or postponed, but it is also possible that the rumors were incorrect from the start.  Allpar has been given disinformation from multiple sources, and other media outlets may have also been hit with inaccurate predictions.

Until now, Allpar has generally been fairly accurate in its predictions, based on some excellent sources. We’d like to thank oh20 and others who would probably prefer not to be named. 

In the future we will be more cautious. I don’t know whether we’ve been hit with pranks or an official campaign, but there are probably few better ways to dealing with rumor mills than poisoning their sources, so to speak. It certainly makes more sense than Apple’s approach of suing them, which tends to result in wealthier rumor sites. The most likely explanation is the simplest - a combination of pranksters and people panicking based on fragmentary information. Like all the analysts who see GM and Chrysler declaring bankruptcy before the year is out.

Note our new irrelevant cats photo, now in color!

Quick reality checks: Chrysler, GM, and more

General Motors has not acquired Chrysler  - at least not yet.

Chrysler can survive with or without a GM merger. Cerberus has the resources to keep it running.

If GM and Chrysler do not merge, it will not cause them to go bankrupt. 

Analysts are unlikely to have prior knowledge of any events. “You will know what happens when they write the press release.” — duster92

Can you trust analysts? Well, consider that up until Chrysler was sold by Daimler, they were still claiming Daimler had saved Chrysler, ignoring any facts that might come up, like massive profits from 1994 until one year after Chrysler was swallowed up and reliable financials became impossible to find. To quote a newspaper article we can’t find now:

“The truth is Daimler did them no favors,” said Jim Hall, managing director of 2953 Analytics of Birmingham, Mich. “They approved products that previous Chrysler management wouldn’t have approved if they were completely drunk and beaten crazy.”

All the publicity is very damaging, especially because the ignorant armchair-theorist consensus is that Chrysler will go bankrupt without the merger; that nobody wants any of its vehicles; and that it has no assets other than the Jeep name. (We’ve already posted the reasons why all that is nonsense.) Still, there is probably going to be fallout from all the speculation. Oh, and to quote BR Miller:

With all the merger, “alliance,” and bailout talk, all customer faith in Chrysler has been shattered. Mix in the fact that Chrysler management was talking about “exceeding targets” and “positive results” while in private they were trying to arrange a merger, and the message to customers is clear: you can’t trust us. Now, the media is spending all its column inches discussing Chrysler as a completely dead company with nothing new in the pipeline to fix its problems.

Automakers are not going to declare bankruptcy to void union contracts. They already pay new employees less than Toyota’s nonunion plants, as far as I can tell from news reports, and veteran workers are not making enough to make the costs of bankruptcy worth the difference. Bankruptcy would cost far more in lost sales and lawyers than it could gain (at least in a few years) in busted-union labor-rate savings, even if the pension plan and health plans could be totally dropped. 

Besides, Autoworkers are not, in general,  unskilled grunts. They do not build cars like they did in the 1920s at Ford’s Rouge plant.  To quote autoworker “st34:”

Most of those assembly line jobs are not easy “pushing a broom” jobs… try working in a plant in the summer when it’s 100 degrees in the building, as the vehicle goes by you have approximately 48 seconds to correctly put all your parts/components on the vehicle or sub assembly, stock your work area, remove dunage/packing material, enter any defects/problems on your terminal and some must make mandatory positive buyoffs on every vehicle into the plant computer system (required for government mandated safety systems). If one part is defective/damaged and does not fit or can’t be used or is stuck in its packaging it puts you behind, people scramble to complete their jobs “in cycle time”. Every job is timed in tenths of a second. Tools start to wear such as philips tips for screws, a DC tool or pneumatic tool will start to fail and run slower increasing your time needed to complete the job but, the line speed remains constant. Some workers must climb inside the car with power tools, and parts complete their man assignments, get out of the vehicle, enter their data, and grab stock for the next job in the 48 seconds. 

And then the engineer’s perspective:

I couldn’t do my job without the experience and expertise of the line techs.

That’s not to mention some articles that should be mandatory reading before people start talking about dumping all the union guys… here are just two: Empowered work teams and Engineering the Neon. 

Let’s get just a little political for a moment. Regardless of e-mail blasts, I think I can safely say that Barack Obama is not planning to make 60 mpg minicars mandatory, nor will he outlaw any car made before 1980 or having an engine with more than three cylinders. I also believe John McCain will not let GM, Chrysler, and Ford go bankrupt. Let’s be reasonable in what we forward, guys - and let’s run those chain letters by snopes and other anti-hoax organizations a little more often, too! 

Finally, all that talk of a big announcement on November 4 — well, so far, that turned out to be a rumor. Perhaps a deliberately orchestrated bit of misinformation — or perhaps something true at the time, but false now. We’ll see tomorrow, but so far, it looks like Chrysler’s independent for a while longer.

Interesting theory: Daimler decided Dodge death

This was a comment from “Patfromigh” which I found interesting enough to make into its own entry. Keep in mind, I did NOT write it and am not necessarily saying I believe it. But it IS interesting.

Was Cerberus just a middleman to get what Daimler really wanted in the first place?

Remember the Valentines Day Massacre? GM wanted Chrysler then. Cerberus had completed the purchase of half of GMAC. So they were in contact with GM also.

If Daimler simply sold Chrysler to GM it risked a public outcry. The pundits who praised Daimler for “saving” Chrysler a decade ago now acknowledge that Chrysler was bled to death by Mercedes’ thievery. Unfortunately it is mentioned in their eulogies for the American auto industry and Chrysler in particular.

If we look at the activities under Daimler’s stewardship of Chrysler we find evidence for a coverup. Shortly after Mitsubishi was kicked to the side of the road, serious small car development was stopped. Talks were started with Chery and other Chinese manufactures. Jeep engineering was turned into a front man for the Mercedes SUV operations in Alabama. The resulting Jeep and Dodge products, the Grand Cherokee, Liberty and Nitro started tanking in the marketplace before fuel prices took off like a rocket. Dodge trucks became more of a consumer toy in the showrooms while Daimler directed the engineering resources into soon to be gone Sterling.

Somewhere in all this has to be the realization that Plymouth customers were not coming back. My guess is that sometime in 2006 with the Dollar’s slide the celebrated LX sedans started getting pricey to build. The restyled Rams lost some of their edge and the styling on other vehicles exterior and interior was careless. No real money was put into updating the PT Cruiser. The Neon went away and the much loved midsized cars were going away. The platform which was used in the replacement for all these products was a hack job. Final development was again left to the customer.

In 2006, anyone who was paying attention could see the shift in the market. SUV sales had peaked. Truck sales looked OK, but crossover sales masked the consumer shift toward smaller vehicles.

Here comes General Motors. They will help with the disposal of the body. A dead Chrysler will put fear in the ranks of the UAW. The watchdogs at the Justice Department and SEC were neutered by the current regime in Washington, but the union would raise hell. The media would amplify any hell the UAW elevated.

When the odd bidding process began and Cerberus “won” [a buyout offer from Kerkorian involving employee ownership was not even considered], immediately there were promises: “we won’t strip and flip Chrysler” and “we are in it for the long run.” Now the body is beginning to smell. GM was willing to bury it before. The guilty parties apparently didn’t see the financial collapse coming [though Chrysler's own economists did]. The party insiders working for Cerberus certainly didn’t see an overnight shift in voter concerns from defense to the economy. GM is being blackmailed to finish the dirty deed before the new sheriff arrives in town. It was supposed to be quick and easy. There is collusion and a conspiracy to cover it up.