'The GM nod,' 'The GM salute' and a clash of cultures

Safety, cost-containment and impenetrable decision-making

"We cannot conclude," the Valukas report reads, "that the atmosphere of cost-cutting had no impact on the failure of GM to resolve these issues earlier."

Mike Colias 
Automotive News
June 5, 2014

 

DETROIT -- Page 248 of Anton Valukas' report on what went wrong with General Motors' deadly ignition switch defect outlines how GM's safety efforts run smack into its cost-conscious culture.
Under the heading "Tone at the Top," the report tries to peg how much GM's culture -- in full-blown cost-cutting mode at the time the bad switches were installed in Chevrolet Cobalts and other small cars -- had to do with its handling of the defect.
The report, which relied in part on interviews of 230 employees, describes a troubling mixed message subtly conveyed by senior leadership: that safety is paramount, yet so is keeping a lid on costs.
"Repeated throughout the interview process we heard from GM personnel two somewhat different directives," the report reads. "When safety is an issue, cost is irrelevant" and "cost is everything."
The report provides a harsh rebuke of GM's infamous committee culture, too, one that on the ignition-switch issue rendered "determining the identity of an actual decision maker … impenetrable."
Some GM employees told investigators that they didn't take any notes during "critical safety meetings" because they didn't think lawyers wanted them to.
Investigators never found evidence of an edict banning note-taking. But "the no-notes direction … reached the status of an urban myth that was followed, an instruction passed from GM employee to GM employee over the years," the report reads.
One of the most colorful descriptions of the cultural morass came from CEO Mary Barra herself. She described for investigators a phenomenon known as the "GM nod."
"The GM nod, Barra described, is when everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room with no intention of follow through," the report reads. "It is an idiomatic recognition of a culture that does not move issues forward quickly, as the story of the Cobalt demonstrates."
There was also the "GM salute," described by another interviewee as "a crossing of the arms and pointing outward toward others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me."
Ultimately, Valukas' report says it uncovered no evidence of any employee making "an explicit trade-off between safety and cost" related to the ignition switch. It notes that, because engineers early on failed to grasp a link between the ignition switch slipping out of the "run" position and airbags not deploying, the problem was treated as a customer-satisfaction issue, not a safety problem.
Still, "we cannot conclude," the report reads, "that the atmosphere of cost-cutting had no impact on the failure of GM to resolve these issues earlier."

Did clear-cutting of forest contribute to Oso, Snohomish County, Washington mudslide?

Official: Residents knew of 'high risk' of landslides
Oso, Washington is still reeling from a mudslide that has claimed the lives of at least 14 people. There are 176 reports of people missing, though there could be duplicate names among that list.
Elizabeth Weise, Janet Kim and John Bacon
USA TODAY
March 25, 2014

DARRINGTON, Wash. — People living in the tiny village destroyed by a mudslide knew there was a "high risk" of slides, a local official said Tuesday.

"This entire year we have pushed message after message that there's a high risk of landslides," said John Pennington, director of Snohomish County Emergency Management. "The dangers and the risks are known."

Pennington said the death toll from Saturday's tragedy remained at 14. Scores more people were reported missing, but he would not estimate how many bodies were still buried in the tons of mud and crumpled homes in Oso, about 55 miles northeast of Seattle.

Pennington acknowledged that the chance of finding survivors was small, but said the effort remained a rescue and recovery operation.

"I've said it before — I believe in miracles," he said. "I believe that people can survive these events."

The collapse followed weeks of heavy rain. Still, Pennington had previously described the disaster as "completely unforeseen." The Seattle Times, however, reported this week that multiple geological reports had warned that the area was at risk.

"No language seems more prescient than what appears in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, warning of 'the potential for a large catastrophic failure,'" the Times reported.

Pennington said work had been done to mitigate slide risk since a much smaller slide struck the area in 2006

"If I'd had any idea that this was going to break that Saturday morning. ... Come on guys, we're very liberal at using reverse 911," he said Tuesday. "There's a reason that we have a very high success rate of mitigating disasters in our county. This is just one that hit us."

Pennington added that a small earthquake, measuring magnitude-1.1, had apparently struck behind the slide area on March 10.

Some people who lived in the area said flooding, not landslides, had been their primary concern.

"I wouldn't buy a house on the river myself, because rivers are unpredictable," said Marshia Armstrong, who lives in nearby Arlington. "Nobody could have predicted that whole huge slide. Another small slide, maybe, but nobody would have predicted that kind of movement."

Armstrong, a real estate agent, said one thing the media have been reporting on was the presence of "pistol butt" trees on the bluff. Those are trees under which the ground has shifted, so their trunks grow out and then up, bending like the butt of a pistol.

But in the rainy, wet Northwest "there are lots of places where the trees are growing up sideways," said Armstrong. The bluff that failed was "on the other side of the river from the houses, so they didn't think it was going to fall on their houses. They didn't think it was going to fill up the whole valley."

President Obama signed an emergency declaration ordering federal aid to the area. "I would just ask all Americans to send their thoughts and prayers to Washington state," Obama said, speaking from the Nuclear Security Summit at The Hague, Netherlands.

The landslide, which consumed a community of almost 50 homes, covers a 1-square-mile area. Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin thanked people for the outpouring of support Tuesday, adding that no additional volunteer help was needed. Federal, state and local responders were at the scene...

Hopes of finding survivors were dim, however, as the rain and muddy, unstable terrain continued to slow rescue and recovery efforts.

Weather Channel meteorologist Jonathan Erdman said more than two inches of rain may fall over the next seven days from four separate weather systems.

"Our crews are up against an enormous challenge. It's like quicksand out there," Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots said.

Crews have to move extremely carefully as they work. "Some of my guys could only go 50 feet in five minutes," he said, because of the debris and danger of being sucked into the mud.

Hots said earth-moving equipment and "lots of people with local knowledge of that specific area" were providing valuable assistance in determining the most likely areas where people could be trapped.

Part of the hill had been logged in the 1980s, said University of Washington professor David Montgomery in Seattle. He studies geomorphology, how landscapes change through time.

"There's no way to know if that contributed to the slide," said Montgomery. "The surface of the Earth is constantly changing. We humans just don't always notice it, because it happens slowly. There had been landslides in that area going back hundreds of years, you can see it in the geography."

Better safe than sorry: cell phones and brain cancer

Preliminary results from a study of people who use cell phones over a period of ten years has some doctors worried, including Ronald Haberman of the University of Pittsburg Cancer Institute.

But most doctors want to wait until the final results are in before they warn against cell phone use.

Cancer researcher warns staff to limit cell phone use
By Jennifer C. Yates and Seth Borenstein
ASSOCIATED PRESS
published in San Diego Union Tribune
July 24, 2008


Herberman...said it takes too long to get answers from science and that he believes people should take action now – especially when it comes to children.

“Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” Herberman said...

In the memo he sent to 3,000 faculty and staff members yesterday, he said children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing.

Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use a speaker or a wireless headset, he said...

A 2008 University of Utah analysis looked at nine studies – including some Herberman cites – with thousands of brain-tumor patients and concludes that “...The potential elevated risk of brain tumors after long-term cellular phone use awaits confirmation by future studies.”

...A driving force behind the memo was Devra Lee Davis, director of the university's center for environmental oncology.

“The question is, do you want to play Russian roulette with your brain?” she said. “I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe.”