Where Is Your Career Headed?

General Motors is known as a multinational company that manufactures many of the cars driven around the world. After all, you wouldn’t expect anything less from a company that’s been in the auto industry for over a century.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Detroit which used to be the home base for General Motors and other Automakers resident there, was America’s crown gem. Visitors from all over the world came to witness the pinnacle of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Unfortunately, the automakers eventually lost their entrepreneurial spirit. And, like the Titanic meeting with the tip of a massive iceberg, the company gradually sunk to the bottom.

Despite a stellar IPO that included a corporate restructuring in 2010, many still believe the General Motors has lost its way and lacks the focus and vision it once had.

What exactly went wrong? A potpourri of things. However, they can be summarized into three major causes;

First, instead of listening to customers who wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles, the automakers continued to produce larger vehicles that no one wanted. Back in the day, owning a Chevrolet, a Cadillac, or even a Hummer was a big deal. Nowadays, people have many other options for a city car now, and General Motors isn’t their go-to option anymore.

Second, instead of taking the competition seriously from their Japanese counterparts and studying their methods of “lean manufacturing,” American automakers stuck doggedly to decades-old processes. It didn’t engage in innovation but expected it could stick with the ways that worked for the company over the past 100 years.

When running a business, it’s very important to look in your neighbors’ yard, so to speak. However, General Motors didn’t bother to check what their competitors were doing to ensure profits and success. Why? Well, General Motors used to control more than 50% of the vehicle market in North America in the 1950s, so the management team considered competitor analysis to be useless. Hence, they were unable to adjust their vision for the upcoming markets. On top of that, they didn’t even bother to focus on them.

While its ideas helped shape the automotive world in the 1900s, the same ideas couldn’t stand up in the face of technological and economic advancements. In the end, customer needs and expectations, innovation by competitors, and the availability of new technologies still didn’t force General Motors to make improvements.

Eventually, the company declared bankruptcy and sought government assistance and in the three and a half years preceding a federal bailout, General Motors lost $82 billion!

So how did this huge company lose its way?
First of all, General Motors didn’t bother to change and adapt its initial ways to the ever-changing economy around them.

They suffered from the arrogance that comes with success, failed to identify and match competition, and refused to adapt to changing circumstances. Probably one of the main reasons for General Motors’ failure was that people stopped seeing its vehicles as viable. Of course, some of us wouldn’t mind having a Pontiac Firebird or a Chevrolet Camaro in our garage, but we probably wouldn’t use those cars daily.

It’s critical to approach your career like a startup. Continue to invest in yourself, rather than relying on yesterday’s talents to carry you through tomorrow. That is the only way to prosper in a dynamic, ever-changing environment.

Take wise risks to reach greatness, form relationships, and pivot to a breakthrough opportunity.

So here’s the question, can you tell or do you care to find out whether you’re on the right track with your career?