Bye
Jim Dollinger
Saturday, September 19, 2026
As Share Goes Bye
There comes a point in every long campaign when humor becomes more useful than another argument. I had been arguing with General Motors for years by then. I had used numbers, history, market share, dealership experience, letters, emails, shareholder proposals, private meetings, public speeches, and just about every other method I could think of. I had quoted Alfred Sloan. I had talked about Billy Durant. I had offered plans. I had criticized incentives. I had praised executives when I thought they deserved praise and challenged them when I thought they did not. And every year I came back to the microphone.
Looking back, I suppose I was Sam. Year after year I came back to the microphone and played the same song. The trouble wasn't that General Motors couldn't hear the music. It was that management never learned the tune.
The song itself wasn't particularly complicated. Listen to the customer. Listen to the dealer. Respect the people who actually sell the automobiles. Protect the brands. Simplify the incentives. Stop confusing rebates with marketing. Build products people desire and then tell the world why they should desire them. Reward performance. Hold leadership accountable. And never forget that the customer has the final vote.
The arrangement changed over the years, but the melody remained remarkably consistent.
When I first spoke at the General Motors Annual Meeting in 1982, I wasn't there to attack anyone. Quite the opposite. I was a new shareholder from western New York, working at a General Motors dealership and studying the company's history. The official transcript introduced me as someone who wanted to address the meeting "from the viewpoint of a new stockholder." I talked about the importance of the decisions being made at General Motors and expressed confidence in the company's leadership. Roger Smith thanked me for my support.
I meant what I said.
The next year the transcript no longer identified me as a shareholder from New York. I was a shareholder from Flint. That change of location told a story all by itself. I had moved west, just as I had decided I would, and I was beginning a new life in the city that had given birth to General Motors. I talked about employee participation, Billy Durant, Alfred Sloan, delegation, hourly workers and profit sharing. I wanted to understand how the company worked and how the people inside it could participate more fully in its success.
In 1984, I moved deeper into the numbers. I asked about executive bonuses, hourly profit sharing, future sales and profitability. In 1985, I told Roger Smith that I thought he was underpaid. That may surprise anyone who knows Buickman only from the later Annual Meetings, but it shouldn't. I was never against executives making money. I believed in paying people for performance. I lived that principle myself. If somebody produced extraordinary results, I believed that person deserved an extraordinary reward.
That philosophy followed me throughout my career. In 1989, I finished number two among Buick salesmen in Michigan. Number one was Al Miller, a fine gentleman. His award included the use of a Reatta Convertible for a week. After the ceremony at the Atheneum Hotel in Detroit, I walked up to Buick Zone Manager Larry Hice and told him that the next year I would be number one in the United States. Larry asked what I would prefer if I won. I told him a trip to Las Vegas would be nice.
The next year I did become number one.
They handed me an envelope for an all-expense-paid trip to San Antonio for the new-car announcement in August. I handed it back and said, "El Paso."
I paid for my own trip to Las Vegas.
I still have never been to Texas.
That story says something about the way I have approached most things in life. There was no "ever" involved. If you don't visualize it, you'll never realize it. What you think, you become. When I told Larry Hice that I would be number one in the United States, I wasn't describing something that had already happened, and I wasn't talking about something I merely hoped might happen. I could see it first.
Focus & Desire.
Obsession is the wrong word. Focus gives you direction. Desire provides the energy. The destination exists in your mind before it appears on the scoreboard.
For years, General Motors market share was one of my scoreboards. By the time the Annual Meetings had moved to Wilmington, the numbers were going in the wrong direction. Incentives were multiplying. Customers were confused. Dealers were frustrated. Brands were losing their identities. Management kept announcing new programs, new promotions, new restructurings and new turnarounds. Turn around enough times and eventually you're going in circles.
I began holding a luncheon after the Annual Meeting called Market Share on Market Street. The official meeting would end and the conversation would continue. I wasn't interested in criticizing General Motors merely for the pleasure of criticizing it. I wanted to discuss what could be done differently.
In 2001, I stood at the Annual Meeting microphone and said, "It's time for things to change at General Motors." I told shareholders I had a plan for change that I believed would increase market share and invited them to join me after the meeting.
In 2002, I became more specific. The official transcript records my words: "We've got great cars. We need to change how we treat our customers. I have a plan to increase market share by five percentage points, with no capital investment, and I'll share it with you."
That eventually became The Plan Five Points.
The philosophy underneath it was even simpler.
"It is all about people."
Customers. Dealers. Salespeople. Employees. Retirees. General Motors already possessed an enormous army. My argument was that the company wasn't using it effectively. Get those constituencies moving in the same direction and the potential was enormous.
Years later, in correspondence with Mark LaNeve, I put the idea another way: "This business is really about the people."
Those words weren't created for this memoir. I wrote them at the time. The emails survive, which is amusing considering I once thought email would never catch on.
Nobody bats a thousand.
By 2005, Greg Lau had helped open a door to Mark LaNeve. Mark asked me directly, "How do I pull down the five point plan."
I decided not to wait.
I began sending him the pieces. Incentives. Dealer margins. Customers. Retirees. Field personnel. Advertising. Customer assistance. The GM Card. Home delivery. Sales recognition. Model-year announcements. Performance pay. Patsy Lou. Suski. Alfred Chandler. Alfred Sloan. Billy Durant. The emails came fast enough that I eventually had to explain that they were pieces of a larger strategy and that I intended to put them into a logical order when we met.
Mark responded to some of them. At one point he wrote, "Thanks keep it coming."
So I did.
That was never a problem for Buickman.
Eventually we met. We talked. We exchanged ideas. For a period, I believed something meaningful might actually happen. But General Motors was General Motors. It was an enormous institution capable of absorbing almost anything: criticism, consultants, committees, ideas, billions of dollars and even urgency.
Meanwhile, the market-share song kept playing.
By 2006, I had been playing it long enough that even Casablanca seemed fair game.
I have always enjoyed the old movies. Bogart. Claude Rains. Peter Lorre. Major Strasser. Victor Laszlo. Sam sitting at the piano playing the song everyone remembers. We began joking recently about which character everyone in the GM story might have been. Red Ink Rick could certainly audition for Major Strasser. Jerry York made a respectable Victor Laszlo. Ross Perot was impossible to cast because Ross Perot could only play Ross Perot. Greg Lau might have qualified for Captain Renault, although Greg would probably object, and with some justification.
At first I thought Buickman might be Rick Blaine.
Then I realized I had the wrong part.
I was Sam.
I had been playing the same song year after year.
And as time went by, General Motors market share went bye.
So I wrote my own rendition. When I reposted it on GeneralWatch in 2014, I introduced it simply as "an oldie from '06 that still applies..."
As Share Goes Bye
You must remember this,
A loss is just a loss.
The pie is still in the sky.
Fundamental marketing does apply,
As share goes bye.
And when Toyota's up by two,
We only get Daewoo,
On Rick Wagoner we cannot rely.
No matter what the economy brings,
As share goes bye.
Rebates and confusion, way out of date,
Execs full of themselves, ready for their fate,
Buyers want self image, hope it's not too late,
For it's that we must supply.
It's still the same old story,
The flight of sales and glory,
A case of change or die.
The world will always respect a winner,
As share goes bye.
Second Verse:
Now also remember this,
Their ass I will not kiss.
The numbers tell no lie.
Good times no longer apply,
As share goes bye.
And when we drop another two,
The Board will not say boo.
On just who can we rely?
No matter what Paul Ballew sings,
As share goes bye.
Plenty of new products, seen their next update.
Execs shuffled around, really same old slate.
Buyers shopping elsewhere, regardless of the rate.
Competition growing stronger, that we can't deny.
Its really getting boring,
Toyota and Nissan soaring,
A case of reality defy.
The industry is losing its leader,
As share goes bye.
Best played in S (as in sales) Flat.
There wasn't much more to explain.
The parody was funny because there was something underneath it that wasn't funny at all. The market-share decline wasn't an abstraction to me. I had spent my career on the retail side of the automobile business. I knew what happened when customers stopped coming through the door. I knew what happened to dealers when volume disappeared. I knew what happened to employees when dealerships and factories couldn't support the payroll. And I lived in Flint. I didn't have to imagine what industrial decline looked like.
"Waterfalls begin as raindrops," I told Rick Wagoner at the 2006 Annual Meeting.
That was the point.
Corporate decline rarely begins with one spectacularly bad decision. A point of market share disappears. A questionable investment is made. Another incentive is added. Another loyal customer changes brands. A dealer closes. A factory loses volume. Another executive is shuffled into another position. Another explanation is offered. Another turnaround is announced.
Raindrops.
Eventually there is a waterfall.
The Annual Meeting bell became almost part of the orchestra. It would ring while I was speaking, warning me that my allotted time had expired.
Ding.
Your time is up, Mr. Dollinger.
Sometimes it rang twice.
There is a certain irony in a corporate bell telling Buickman his time is running out while Buickman is trying to tell General Motors that its time is running out.
By 2007, I was telling shareholders to "Follow the money." By 2008, at General Motors' one-hundredth Annual Meeting, I reminded the room where I came from.
"I was the top Buick salesman in the United States of America six times."
Then I reminded everyone whose meeting it was.
"This is our meeting. The last time I looked, it was the annual meeting of shareholders. We're the shareholders."
That statement captured something I had believed since the beginning. If you owned even one share of General Motors, you were an owner. Your influence might be tiny, but the principle remained. Ownership came with responsibility. Read. Vote. Ask questions. Speak when you have something worth saying.
By then I had traveled around the country talking with dealers, suppliers, workers and retirees. I had listened. I had studied. I had accumulated decades of retail experience. And I had become increasingly frustrated that people who actually knew how to sell automobiles seemed to have so little influence over how General Motors marketed them.
So I put it in terms anyone could understand.
"If your hot water heater blows up, Stan, you don't go buy a toothbrush. If you've got a problem you've got a toothache, you call a dentist. You want to sell cars, call a car salesman."
That was Buickman stripped to the frame.
Use people who know what they're doing.
Eventually, though, I began to wonder whether returning to Wilmington every year accomplished anything. The usual suspects had already been rounded up. Red Ink Rick remained in charge. Buickman had said what he came to say.
Maybe it was time to disappear from the Annual Meetings for a while.
No letter of transit required.
I had said what I believed. The transcripts existed. The emails existed. The speeches existed. The numbers existed. General Motors knew where to find me.
Point the searchlight north toward Flint.
I'll be back.
Today, General Motors market share is passé for me. That doesn't mean it wasn't important. It was enormously important during those years because it was the scoreboard I believed told us whether customers were choosing General Motors. But it was never an obsession.
It was Focus & Desire.
Focus can change.
Desire doesn't have to.
These days I can sit in my backyard beneath my maple trees with a cup of green tea and spend an afternoon thinking about quantum physics. As the weather turns, I'll migrate back into my studio. Green tea and hugging the maples aren't quite as appealing without warm sunshine. Quantum physics works indoors or outdoors. It's just a matter of time and focus.
Lately I've been thinking about perception and perspective. They are related, but they aren't the same. Two people can look at exactly the same situation and see something completely different because of where they stand. General Motors management could look at an incentive program and perceive a sales tool. I could look at the same program from the showroom floor and perceive customer confusion, declining residual values and damage to the brand.
Same program.
Different perspective.
Different perception.
Perhaps that was the argument all along. Management looked down from the executive floor. Dealers looked across the showroom. Workers looked down the assembly line. Shareholders looked at the annual report. Customers looked at the sticker.
Same corporation.
Different perspective.
I kept asking General Motors to look at itself from somewhere else. Come down to the showroom. Talk to the customer. Ask the salesman. Listen to the worker. Listen to the retiree. Walk through Flint.
Then look at the corporation again.
Maybe you'll see something different.
Now I am gathering material for this book like a squirrel gathering acorns before winter. Annual Meeting transcripts. LaNeve emails. Greg Lau correspondence. Jerry York. Jerry Flint. Photographs. Letters. Buick records. Newspaper clippings. Stories that come back because one old piece of paper triggers another memory.
Steph is going on extended leave, so apparently it's me and the machine now.
That should be interesting.
I don't do apps. I handwrite letters. I call instead of texting. I'm the same fellow who once thought email wouldn't catch on. Now I'm learning how to take a photograph, find the plus sign and send forty years of history into artificial intelligence.
Buickman goes digital.
What could possibly go wrong?
Right now the job is simply to gather the acorns. The Annual Meeting transcripts will form the backbone of the book, and I want every word I spoke included verbatim. Not because it matters so much who said it, but because what was said matters. The narrative can provide context. It can explain the people, places and consequences. But when the transcript begins, let the record speak.
And then there is the question of what happens after publication.
Somewhere along the way, we began talking about Joe Rogan.
Austin?
Absolutely not.
I have managed to live this long without setting foot in Texas, and I see no reason to ruin a perfectly good streak now. If Joe wants the Buickman story, I have a better invitation:
"Wouldn't You Really Rather Come to Flint?"
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report came to me. Journalists from Russia came. Journalists from Japan came. Joe can find Flint.
We'll have green tea.
And cognac.
Three hours?
Better than a three-hour cruise.
We'll let Mary Ann decide.
But there is one word I won't use anymore.
"Ever."
There is no "ever" if you don't visualize it. You'll never realize something you refuse first to see.
What you think, you become.
I understood that when I told Larry Hice I would become number one in the United States. I understood it when I came west. I understood it at Patsy Lou. I understood it at Suski. And whether General Motors understood it or not, I understood it every time I walked toward that microphone.
I can visualize this book too.
The Annual Meeting speeches, every one of my words verbatim, forming the backbone. The emails between them. The dealership stories showing where the ideas came from. My father. New York. Flint. Blain Buick. Patsy Lou. Suski. Springsteen. Perot. York. Lau. LaNeve. Red Ink Rick. The victories. The mistakes. The arguments. The humor. The documents. The people.
Not 1,300 pages.
I'm not Carroll Quigley.
Just long enough to tell the story properly.
And after publication, when the microphones are set up in Flint, the green tea is poured and somebody decides it is finally time for the cognac, perhaps I'll borrow one last line from Rick Blaine.
"I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
The usual suspects have already been rounded up. No letter of transit is necessary. Sam is still at the piano.
And Buickman still knows the song.
As Share Goes Bye.
