In announcing the latest in a seemingly endless series of restructurings last week, GM Chairman Rick Wagoner held forth on how quickly the automaker’s leadership team has responded to the quickly changing dynamics of the U.S. automotive landscape.  This latest plan, he marveled, was developed a mere six weeks after GM announced plans to shutter four truck plants and put its HUMMER brand up for sale during its annual shareholder meeting on June 5.  But somehow the alleged alacrity of these latest efforts escapes me: Why weren’t these latest actions not part of the plan announced six weeks ago?  More to the point, why was GM so apparently ill prepared for what has happened in the market?

GM CFO Fritz Henderson told reporters during the latest “turnaround” announcement that the market began to decidedly shift in April.  Anyone with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal or a TV with basic cable service (CNBC) or who needed to put gas in their SUV saw the shift begin prior to April, but let’s say that was the point of the shift.  Higher fuel prices and a markedly sagging U.S. economy are not something the folks at GM’s headquarters can manipulate themselves.  But Wagoner and his team should not get a free pass for failing their organization on one of the basic tenants of business: disaster planning.  What were they waiting for?

I will readily admit that I did not graduate from a prestigious MBA program, but common sense demands any business to have some sort of plan ready to be deployed in the case of things like zooming gas prices and a collapsing housing market.  GM, it seems, had no such plan.  Now, the employees and retirees who had little to do with the decisions made on the product side of the business—which drives revenue—will pay the price—a more significant price than that being paid by Wagoner, Lutz and the rest of the senior executive gang who will not get their annual bonuses.  Their decisions—like basing the business largely on pickups and SUVs—have proven to be exceedingly bad.  And so they miss out on a bonus.  Big deal.

GM has been living in a la-la land for too long.  It’s not like crude oil prices haven’t been creeping up for the past seven years—a barrel of crude sold for an inflation-adjusted average of $32 in 2003, $55 in 2005, $66 in 2007 and is running at $98 through the first half of 2008.  Instead of watching what was actually happening on the commodities markets, GM product czar Bob Lutz and his product development team continued to develop products like the Camaro and the G8—great idea now, eh?—and large crossovers that do little to help reduce fuel consumption.  The newest small car that’s going to save GM—the Chevrolet Cruze—will not arrive until 2010, along with a slew of other products that will be too little too late.  Most disconcerting is the fact that GM’s new microcar—the Chevrolet Beat—will not make it to the U.S. because it was not engineered to meet U.S. crash standards (that’s likely to change with the second-generation, which arrives sometime after 2013).

The facts are simple: Wagoner and his team have overseen the largest market share decline in GM’s history, failed to provide the proper products necessary to keep GM relevant, and driven the stock price to levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration.  When will GM’s board wake up?  Maybe in another six weeks.