Ford Motor Co. (F) has a very creative story about how debt will be restructured and breakeven or profibility is coming in 2011.  If you believe this then tell the Easter Bunny "Hi" for me.  Ford is still operating without government aid, but they aren't selling any cars and won't be for the foreseeable future.  Even Toyota is struggling and losing money... You know what that means for Ford... Take a ride in your F-150 all the way to zero.  There's a better four-letter word that starts with F to describe the situation.

Read more here.

I'm currently reading What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H. McCormack.  I'm not reading it to learn what you don't learn in business school, but more to find out how a human can start an empire like International Management Group (IMG) on his own.  Anway, check out this paragraph from the book which was published in 1984... about 25 years ago.

"Ben Bidwell, now the executive vice-president of Chrysler and the former head of North American sales for the Ford Motor Company, once described to me Ford's structure - and the systems created to support it - as a "wall of molasses.  You can't get anything in.  You can't get anything out.  You can't move up.  You can't move sideways.  It takes two years even to move down." 

And we're sitting here trying to figure out why these auto companies are going bankrupt?  They don't have profitable business models.  They're too big, too slow, and too stupid.

The book then looks at how public companies are destined to fail because they are trying to impress the wrong people.  This is very true.  Check out the paragraph from the book below.

"American business decisions are often based on winning a popularity contest, on impressing certain people.  And the peope everyone is trying to impress work on Wall Street.  Impressing Wall Street has become the Great American Corporate Pastime.  Long-term gains are sacrificed for short-term benefits.  Bad corporate decisions are made because a company would rather look good than be good.  Real profit is thrown away in order to pep up the next quarter artificially.  We would all be a lot better off if more companies tried to impress themselves rather than the people who work at the lower tip of Manhattan."

I couldn't have said it better myself.  Well...actually I probably could have, but I need to give Mr. McCormack some credit here.  When all these quarters of artificial profits add up over time they create a huge problem.  If companies weren't so worried about impressing the stockholders every three months there would be a lot more companies that had long term success.  Over the long haul public companies are destined to fail because of their constant short term goals.  Greed on Wall Street will kill even the best of companies.