Well hope­fully noth­ing. But if you’re one of the many employ­ees of GM it might be time to start look­ing for other sources of income.

This is the beauty of resid­ual income. If you have a good mon­e­tary stream com­ing in, you won’t need to worry about clo­sures and bank­rupt­cies. And with mul­ti­ple sources of income, you are well diver­si­fied and thus pro­tected against a recession.

In the mid­dle of all this reces­sion and bank­ruptcy frenzy I think it’s impor­tant to men­tion GM and learn from their mis­takes.  I’ve attached this arti­cle below and hope you find it relevant.

There are a few things I’ve taken away from GM that they men­tion in the article:

• If some­one can make some­thing for cheaper and sell it for cheaper, then you bet­ter start reeval­u­at­ing your busi­ness model. Either dif­fer­en­ti­ate or lower your costs.
• Think of your mar­ket, your clients, not always about your­self. In GM’s case, the United Auto Work­ers union, which owns almost 20% of GM, may have a hard time bring­ing GM out of their slump if they only think of themselves.
• Sell only the best prod­ucts. In order for GM to emerge from the bank­ruptcy, they may have to get rid of their worst-selling cars and focus only on their best products.

Keep those points above in mind. Even though you’re not a multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tion, you can apply them to your own business.

(source)

“Meet the new, government-owned GM

NEW YORK (For­tune) — With Gen­eral Motors hav­ing filed for bank­ruptcy, the ques­tion arises: What will the bank­rupt com­pany look like and how will it be different?

The answer to the sec­ond part is “a lot.” The answer to the first is nobody knows for sure, but it may not be pretty.

At the out­set, let’s estab­lish one fact: Assum­ing an entity called “Gen­eral Motors” does emerge from bank­ruptcy, it will be a dif­fer­ent com­pany than the one that went in. Only the good bits will come out: Chevy, Cadil­lac, Buick, and GMC and the plants needed to make the parts and assem­ble the cars and trucks.

The bad bits — Pon­tiac, Sat­urn, Hum­mer, Saab, Opel and other legacy oper­a­tions — will be left behind in another com­pany. New GM could emerge from bank­ruptcy in 60 days to 90 days; old GM could be stuck there for sev­eral years.

New GM could just as well be called “Gov­ern­ment Motors,” because the U.S. is going to own 60% of it, with the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment own­ing another 12%. That may not be a good thing. Remem­ber East Germany’s Tra­bant and other vehi­cles built by the government-owned com­pa­nies in the old Soviet Union?

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