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Excerpts from Cracking the Corporate Code

Joe Anderson dealt with a difficult boss several years after he joined General Motors. He could have analyzed the difficulty as related to race, and he may well have been correct. But Anderson analyzed it as an organizational issue, and that also may have been accurate. What is indisputable is that his analysis allowed him to master a difficult situation and move on to the next assignment. "When I returned from the Harvard Program, General Motors was going through a restructuring. So I went on a temporary assignment to the reorganization team breaking down the barriers between brand name cars, like Pontiac and Chevrolet, and putting them into large cars, small cars, trucks, and so forth. I went to work for a vice president in that organization. For the first time, I experienced somebody I knew didn't want me there. This was not a race issue. I was a Pontiac guy, and he was from a different division of GM. I was not his guy. There were other guys from other places who were also not his guys. He was old school and traditional and all those things some of us were not about. I had a meaningful job, significant responsibility, but I was never on his team. And so I finally got bailed out and moved to the component group as opposed to the car side of the business."