On the B2B issue, GM’s supplier-oriented initiatives are more crucial precisely because of the dire need for a refresh of its auto lineup. "The reason their U.S. market share dropped was because they weren’t bringing out cars people really wanted to buy," says Keller. It’s an open question whether GM’s upcoming designs will reverse the trend, although Lutz helped overcome similar criticisms when he took the helm at Chrysler in 1986, and author Keller says Lutz has already started to make an impact by accelerating certain promising forthcoming models while nixing others. GM’s internal revamp and collaboration with suppliers have put GM back into the race.

Still more significant is the change of GM’s mind-set. "You need a different attitude than when you’re developing a car and you have to meet safety standards, where you can’t afford not to be right," says Wagoner, when asked what GM has learned from its e-business ventures. "[In e-business] we’d like to be right every time, but the cost would be that we’d be slow, expensive and probably last-to-market in a lot of areas."

By running limited pilot versions of e-business projects, GM experiments in a cost-effective manner. Asked about how his group determines the right amount of resources to allocate to each project, Szygenda says his team holds sometimes-heated priority-setting discussions, but he ultimately boils it down to "gambling." Ask GM executives about the goals they set prior to launching various initiatives, and the answers are uniformly nonspecific. That’s true even in a clear success like the Celta, of which GM’s Hogan will only say, "I guess we might have hoped for 50 percent of those sales to happen online, so we’ve been pleasantly surprised." That attitude reflects a significant shift of mind-set for a traditionally slow industrial giant in a traditionally slow industry.

Expect GM to continue to invest in e-business. The IS group has delivered the lineup of e-business initiatives without breaking the bank, partly because of the small-pilot approach and partly because the IS budget prior to 1996 was so bloated that Szygenda’s group has been able to pay for all the company’s e-business plans while still cutting the yearly IS budget by $600 million to $700 million, to just over $3 billion today. Furthermore, GM holds equity stakes in 38 Internet-based and software businesses?stakes gained without spending a dime, by providing those vendors with product development guidance and one of the world’s biggest customers. (That contrasts with Ford, which bought its way into Internet equity via a $50 million purchase of Internet Capital Group stock in 1999?stock Ford later dumped for less than $1 million.) In all, GM’s e-business work benefits greatly from continuity of leadership. Szygenda has been the CIO of GM for six years. Ford, on the other hand, has had three CIOs during the same period.