General Motors: Planning for the Future

General Motors: Planning for the Future

With the price of gas skyrocketing throughout the country, every car company has to rethink their planning strategy to stay competitive. Each company has come up with clever ways to keep customers coming back. General Motors introduced the employee discount for the general public. This seemed to help them stay competitive in the market. With this and other economical troubles, General Motors is developing new strategic planning to help with the future success of the company.

In order to keep up with the competitive market, General Motors had a hard decision to conclude with the closing of some of their plants. Although many lives and towns will be affected, it is the best decision for the company to maintain their strategic goals. General Motors has been struggling to stay competitive with foreign car competitors. They have revamped to strategy and budgets forecast to come back to the ring. But the only way for reviving is for them to implement the Sloan belief. "Sloan believes that there are three main constituents to running General Motors effectively, decentralized control, the institution of financial controls, and realizing the concept of the business in terms of the entire market. William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors, first implemented a decentralized management style. Sloan understood the importance of the decentralized management, in running General Motors, which Durant enforced, and continued to subscribe to this business model during his time at General Motors. The essence of General Motors decentralization was the autonomous car division; each division would be in charge of its own profit making activities and have its own managerial staff, in essence the creation of profit centers." (Bocra, Cumo, & Mee, 2000)

The strategic planning for General Motors has been challenged with the task of developing new vehicles that offer the consumer advanced technologies that improve on energy consumption and have a decreased adverse affect on the environment. Because of their global competitors, General Motors also faces the challenge of providing these advancements while providing attractive pricing on their products.

In recent times, the impact of carbon monoxide (CO) and other pollutants on air quality has become a global concern. As a result, The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed national standards on CO emissions on motor vehicles as well as industrial facilities. The Clean Air Act, enacted in 1970, required automakers to develop strategic plans to modify car and truck engines to reduce lead and other pollutants from auto emissions, and to develop research that offer alternative sources of fuel for motor vehicles. Additionally, improvements were necessary to implement a reduction of air and water pollution at their assembly plants. General Motors, the world's largest automaker, to comply with EPA standards, introduced the catalytic converter, in 1974. In an effort to make additional reductions in emissions of their vehicles, General Motors introduced new smaller versions of their popular models which were an entirely new trend among automakers.

American consumption of oil has increased steadily throughout the 20th century. This trend has been complicated with the fact that American foreign policy has placed the U.S. in a vulnerable position with foreign oil suppliers. With the never ending oil price increases, combined with the increased American dependence on foreign oil has made it necessary for automakers to develop more fuel efficient vehicles. Interestingly, standards set forth by EPA regulations on fuel economy, provides more lenient standards on sport utility and small trucks. Consequently, automakers, including General Motors, have successfully devised marketing strategies that have made these types of vehicles