ANALYSIS-GM culture: a problem that cash can't fix?

By Kevin Krolicki

DETROIT, March 1 (Reuters) - America's largest automaker has been left dependent on the kindness of strangers -- its fate in the hands of bureaucrats as much as car buyers.

But as the Obama administration weighs whether and how to proceed with a request from General Motors Corp for up to $30 billion in federal aid, some experts and even consultants who have worked for the automaker, say a massive cash injection now may not cure everything that ails GM.

What GM needs, they say, is a radical shake-up of an inward-looking century-old corporate culture dominated by financial executives focused on chasing the next deal in a failed effort to reverse the automaker's decades-long decline.

Many middle managers and other salaried workers, they say, have been too comfortably cocooned for too long.

"GM has developed a lot of bright people but it has also bred insularity," said Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and an expert on labor-management issues in the auto industry.

"GM for much of its history was so large that it thought it was a proxy for the world. It is not," he said.

Through $82 billion in losses over the past years and a close brush with bankruptcy, GM's board has remained firm in its backing of Chief Executive Rick Wagoner.

Now, even some former critics have come around to the view that Wagoner should stay on to guide the company through its cash crunch, but others also say the time is right to begin thinking about what kind of GM emerges from this crisis.