I wrote this piece the morn­ing Gen­eral Motors entered into bank­ruptcy. When I hear a CEO say some­thing that’s almost self-delusional, I won­der if he’s try­ing to rally the troops or really believes it.

Sur­pris­ingly, GM responded with an open let­ter to me. I took them up on their offer to sur­vey their mod­els and deal­ers, and I wrote a long pri­vate mes­sage back to their head of design. When I was unable to get any response, I fol­lowed this piece with some­thing, although tongue-in-cheek, would have been a rad­i­cal way to express their new committment.

GM has still not begun to touch the poten­tial of the social media to begin to forge gen­uine rela­tion­ships with their customers.

Good morn­ing Mr. Henderson —

Big day for you, no ques­tion. My best wishes go out to you on Day One run­ning the new Gen­eral Motors. Clean slate, pretty much, except for those legacy issues that might hold you back. A cul­ture of poor vision, poor design, poor assem­bly, poor ser­vice. That’s a lot to change all at once, but you’ll need to do it. At your press con­fer­ence you said the new GM would be bring­ing to the mar­ket, among other things, great design. That really struck me. I won­dered what your process would be for inspir­ing, cre­at­ing and rec­og­niz­ing great design. And how could a pas­sion for great design be incul­cated into the cul­ture on a per­ma­nent basis?

Your pas­sen­ger vehi­cle sales are now one-fifth of what they were at their peak. You’ve lost sales to all those well-designed and well built Japan­ese, Euro­pean and even Amer­i­can cars. I can’t imag­ine that with­out great design you will be able to get peo­ple like me out of their Audis and Hondas.

And that’s what wor­ries me. I really won­der if Gen­eral Motors can sud­denly start to make stuff that’s well-designed, from both the engi­neer­ing side, as well as the inte­rior and exte­rior. Can an orga­ni­za­tion that has made so much truly ugly stuff sud­denly start mak­ing great design?

I went to your new web­site gmreinvention.com and perused the por­traits of the top team, just to get some clues about the design sense there. I see mostly corporate-type guys, in ties and suits, and the one thing that doesn’t leap out is, “Wow — great design sense.” What leaps out is, “Older white guys wear­ing suits to the office in Detroit, except for one woman and one black guy.” And while we’re all look­ing at this new web­site together for clues about the new GM, does it worry any of you that the port­fo­lio of the woman, Susan E. Doherty, is described as: “North Amer­ica VP, Buick-Pontiac-GMC.” Didn’t any­one tell the web designer that Pon­tiac was buried sev­eral weeks ago?

The first clue that I will be look­ing for that will indi­cate whether you might be get­ting it will be how you go about chang­ing the old GM logo and brand­ing. Will you step up to the world class level of your com­pe­ti­tion, or will we have more lipstick-on-a-pig level efforts? The truth is, if your new logo and design efforts are syn­the­sized for you by an out­side agency work­ing with your mar­ket­ing peo­ple, chances are the new look of GM will be as dis­con­nected from your aspi­ra­tions as the cur­rent worn-out GM blue and white let­ters over a thick bar.

What should your process be to dis­cover your new image? A sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of top team peo­ple from a broad spec­trum of lead­er­ship is going to need to get together and decide what the new GM really stands for. If you don’t get this crit­i­cal first step done right, the chances that any­thing else you do will be able to accu­rately express your aspi­ra­tions for the new GM will be zero. If you don’t know who you are and can’t artic­u­late it, a whole bunch of peo­ple through­out the orga­ni­za­tion are going to be mak­ing up their ver­sion of what the new GM is, and it’s going to be way, way too much like the old GM.

Once you have those retreats to fig­ure out who you are, then you’ll be able to talk to design­ers about that new logo. You will be able to tell them what you want to con­vey, instead of the other way around. And when they get it right, you’ll be the ones who know.

In the mean­time, the whole world is watch­ing. And we’ll know, too, when we see that new “GM” for the first time, what your future is.