What GM Can Learn from IBM

The automaker's future may depend as much on selling a service as a product, a lesson that helped save IBM from extinction two decades ago

BusinessWeek, February 26, 2009 — Disappointingly for anyone with hopes for the future of General Motors (GM), the restructuring plan submitted by the automaker to the U.S. Treasury on Feb. 17 offers little in the way of a long-term comeback strategy. It's all about cost-cutting, federal financing, and making gas engines more efficient.

What more should we expect? The typical fate of corporate behemoths that flounder is either death or permanent eclipse, and perhaps GM's fate will be no different. Still, the recent past offers one rare exception that GM would do well to emulate.

Gerstner's IBM Reinvention