Will Fiat be the New GM?

Let’s hope Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne is a student of history. His apparent strategy of combining Fiat and Chrysler with whatever GM assets he can find around the world, including Germany and South America, will create a global behemoth. With such diverse operations and assets, it seems like a classic generalist strategy, trying to win on the basis of scale and scope. Of course the modern architect of this very same strategy is none other than General Motors! Takeaway lesson: you can’t win on size alone.

But the jury is still very much out on this one, especially given that no crime has yet to be committed. And, if Sergio can actually take advantage of the massive assets he is hoping to assemble to create a series of world cars that rely on the same basic skeleton in different markets, perhaps there is something good that can come out of it. Unfortunately, the automobile industry has not been good to empire builders in the past …