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

Nokia looking at big picture

Latest acquisition places cellphone ad unit in Boston

Boston Globe, October 18, 2007 — Nokia Corp., the world's dominant cellphone maker, is positioning itself to compete against the likes of MySpace, iTunes, and Google, and is anchoring a key part of its new business in the Back Bay.

Hasbro banking on “Transformers” hitting it big

Film based on hit toys, �sort of opens another chapter for us,� executive says

MSNBC, June 18, 2007 — Hasbro hopes the upcoming release of "Transformers" — based on the company's "robots in disguise" toys introduced in the 1980s — will herald a new era for the company that in the past few years has remade itself from a toy maker to an entertainment company.