Matt Bai’s article about the GM bailout in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine has a pull quote that could have come from any of my team building training for businesses.
Until recently, at least, General Motors itself has resisted bankruptcy with the same single-minded desperation with which most able-bodied men resist driving a minivan. This is not only because bankruptcy would wipe out G.M.’s shareholders — some of whom, coincidentally, are the executives who run the company — but also because G.M. believes that going under would mortally wound its brand. The thinking here is that no one would risk buying a car, not to mention a service warranty, from a company attached to the words “Chapter 11.”
This argument underscores the deeper problem afflicting G.M. over a period of decades now — not simply soaring labor costs or global competition but also an inability to grasp underlying changes in American culture. There probably was a time when a well-publicized bankruptcy would, in fact, have destroyed the viability of a brand. But in the 20 years since Silicon Valley start-ups began transforming the workplace, younger Americans — in other words, those who now make up the heart of the consumer market — have largely dispensed with the mythology of the infallible institution. Transparency and reinvention, rather than stability and regality, are the more valued assets in an economy where entrepreneurs expect to stumble more often than they succeed and where employees expect to have to change jobs (if not careers) multiple times. In the fastest-growing quarters of the economy, admitting your failures and remaking yourself is the new American work ethic.
