GM’s Cocooned Fourteenth Floor
It’s typical of a company that’s suffering from a stultified executive culture to grab at a marketing effort to gloss over decades of failed imagination. Such is the case at General Motors.
The air on the fourteenth floor at GM Headquarters is rarified by its old-boy culture, allowing only those chosen by insiders from among insiders to occupy an office among them. Fourteen makes membership at Augusta National Golf Club look egalitarian by comparison. Possibly the executive floor is jinxed. It is, after all, the thirteenth floor . . . who’s kidding whom when the elevator sails directly from twelve to fourteen?
No matter the floor number, GM has been building the wrong cars, marketed at a declining buyer base for decades now. Living up to an old-folks mentality, it continued developing old-folks cars as it did with great success in 1959 when my old daddy bought his first new Cadillac. Daddy’s car was very starchy and proper, in the seventeen-foot-long, tailfinned definition of prope…