Mark Hogan's e-vision.

The President of e-GM sees e-possibilities everywhere. In the not-so-distant future, in fact, he sees a car that's like a browser on four wheels.

General Motors Corp. has been changing its ways at breakneck speed. The Old GM was stodgy, clubby and gray - a lot like its cars and its bottom line once were. The New GM is making up for nearly two decades of missed opportunities and generally declining market share -- but improving at an astounding rate, so fast that the other car giants are beginning to worry. They wonder if GM's state of massive reorganization in the middle of the 21st century information revolution may be its greatest strategic advantage. It's an advantage that arguably didn't exist five years ago - or even three years ago.

Timing is everything.

Just ask 49-year-old Mark Hogan, the new president of e-GM. A little over a year ago, Hogan had a firm handle on his own e-mail - and that was about it. Today he's the Keeper of the Vision. He's the guy who hopes to rocket GM's cars - and GM's relationship with consumers - at light speed into the future. Eighteen months ago he was a GM Career Car Guy. Today, he hangs out with the super-gurus of the information age. Oracle. Sun Microsystems. Who knows, maybe he even drinks cappuccino now.

Hogan: I really didn't have a clue about this stuff as recently as the Friday before they made the announcement of e-GM. I was in a part of reworking our manufacturing and product strategy in the small car end of our business. So I was really in the bowels of the core end of the business and was doing my own e-mail and stuff. I was not an Internet guru by any stretch. This thing kind of came out of left field.

After a little over a year on the job, Mark Hogan is a different kind of guy. 1-le sees e-possibilities everywhere. In-car Web access. Remote diagnostics and emergency help support (already starting to be offered on GM's OnStar-equipped vehicles). He imagines a world in which a person can hear a song on satellite radio while driving on the freeway - without changing channels each time you hit a new town. That's actually going to happen when 100-station XM Satellite Radio debuts this spring, and will soon be available on GM cars. Eventually you'll be able to order a CD of what you hear at the push of a button or by saying a few words.

Hogan envisions retinal scanning devices that can warn a driver if he or she isn't watching the road carefully enough. Technology will track the movement and direction of your eyesight - and if you're distracted by your cell phone or your global positioning navigation system, you'll get reminded to pay attention. This is not wild visionary baloney. It's really going to happen. In the future that Mark Hogan sees, a car will be much more than a car.

Hogan: We're thinking of it as a browser on four wheels. And we're trying to make it a functional, safe browser for people. But we want to make sure that it meets the expectations of an Information Age customer -- where information is expected to be instantaneous.

But why choose Mark Hogan to run GM? Timing. Bringing in an outsider would probably waste years just in getting oriented to the massive GM infrastructure. Hogan knows where the skeletons are. He knows how to make things happen. He's known throughout the organization. As a self-described "change agent," Hogan had been both foot soldier and general in the company.

For 25 years, he did what most prized GM management talent did - he rotated throughout the GM industrial empire. He became something of a GM renaissance man - Factory Analyst, GM Financial Staff, Public Affairs, Business Planning, General manager for the GM Small Car Operations in North America.

Hogan: I was working the internal side of design engineering in the manufacturing of vehicles, which didn't allow us many 'touch points" with the consumer. Now I'm in there constantly, so it's been a big change. The first thing we did when we formed e-GM was to form an e-Dealer Advisory Council... a win/win for GM, our dealers and certainly the customer.

Where does a re-invented Car Guy get his ideas? Mark Hogan believes anything is possible if you have the right kind of leadership support. And he relied on a lot of advice from the pantheon of the new economy. Scott McNealy, head of Sun Microsystems, advised him to think strongly outside the box - to understand that a car could be more than a car. A car could be an Internet "node" on wheels.

Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, challenged Hogan to understand that a car can be more to a person than just a vehicle. There are limitless possibilities for raking an old product - be it a printer or a car - and making it into a critical and indispensable connector to the technological future. Making good in the new economy demands vision.

Talk about culture clash! The old economy icon playing footsie with the new!

Hogan: I'd say their vision of the future is different than some of our traditional brick and-mortar executives here. What I've noticed recently is that there seems to be more of a coming together - quicker than I would've thought. When I first entered this thing a year ago and walked into places like Yahoo, people are walking in with shorts and backpacks and sandals and they offered me cappuccino and some jujubes... I've noted that there's a level of pragmatism in terms of where you draw the line between being fun and geeky and new, and making a buck. And at the end of the day, the people that combine bricks and clicks effectively are going to be winners.

Nowhere is combining bricks and the clicks more vital than in utilizing the power of e-commerce. GM and the other automotives are already racing to the head of the class with Covisint -- soon to be the largest business-to-business e-commerce operation in the world, marrying automotive suppliers with the likes of GM, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and others.

But now GM has set its sights on consumers, through business-to-consumer e-business. For a while, automotive pundits speculated about the demise of the traditional car dealer -- destroyed by the direct on-line purchase of cars. But it doesn't look like it's going that way at all for e-GM.

Hogan: If you've got established distribution, there's no way you should try to blow that up. I mean, that's the strength. Your customer touch points ultimately want to be personalized. But the Internet allows you an opportunity to provide information and access at the customer's convenience.

This synergy between old and new is what consumers really want. Hogan works under the assumption that 99 percent of car buyers still want to see, touch, feel and drive a car before buying -- thus making the existence of traditional dealerships vital. But he knows that an estimated 60-80 percent of all new car buyers have visited at least six Websites to inform themselves on what they want -- before even visiting the dealership. Hogan's e-vision allows GM to change the way it interacts with customers, while keeping the dealer model intact.

Hogan: The customer's in control. That's the interesting thing about the Internet. The customer decides. It wasn't but five years ago that the customer really wasn't in control. In fact, one of the things we discovered with Saturn -- and I think that's one of our proactive lessons -- is if you treat the customer right and really give them a very transparent opportunity to shop and buy, they will come.

E-GM has begun testing this theory wholesale, rapidly moving to offer customers the chance to order cars almost entirely online. In October testing began in Minneapolis through the GMbuypower.com Website, offering customers an online choice of on-the-lot market inventory at a special e-price -- and with online credit approval from GMAC. But the sale and signatures take place at the dealer of your choice. In December -- again in Minneapolis -- customers will be able to custom order the 2001 Oldsmobile Alero online, with an order-to-delivery time of only 15-30 days -- less than half the usual delivery time.

Hogan: "Order to delivery" will essentially convert our plants from a process where you build 60-90 days of inventory at our dealerships, to a place where you have only a handful of vehicles at the dealership -- primarily for a test drive and showroom experience. The vast majority of the vehicles will be ordered online or through the dealer, in an order-to-delivery mechanism. That's where we're going.

And they're getting there fast. In three to four years, all GM cars will be able to be custom-ordered online. At lightning speed. And that scares the competition.

Speaking of scary, Mark Hogan is nothing like the GM executive of five years ago. At this interview he wore a cardigan and an open collar shirt in his e-GM headquarters at the top of New Center One -- a wardrobe halfway between the Brooks Brothers suits of the old-guard automotive genre and the T-shirts worn by the new economy company chiefs. Yes, success in the new economy will ultimately be a process of mediating between the old and the new. This is a fact that old businesses must face to survive in the new economy, but also one that the new economy must face to keep its bottom line.

Hogan: The old economy companies, if you will, have a chance of being successful if they marry the advantages and the technologies of Web-based solutions, particularly when it comes to B-to-B and B-to-C. There's a powerful opportunity, and that's why companies like General Motors are moving aggressively in that regard.

Hogan has faced a more personal kind of culture adjustment head-on. Last year he converted his 77-year-old house into a modern home. Within the old walls of the refurbished Birmingham farmhouse, he installed DSL cables for high-speed Internet access throughout the house. He put two-way video conferencing in the home office and an intercom system to keep an eye on his three kids. Along with Internet access for his children came content screening to keep the bad stuff out. Mark Hogan updated an old American standby for the 21st century.

Just like he's doing for GM.

About the author

Terrence Oprea is president and COO of Southfield-based Mort Crim Communications Inc. This is his latest in a series of interviews with key regional leaders. He can be reached at: [e-mail].

File on Mark T. Hogan

Born - May 15, 1951, Chicago.

Education - Bachelor of science-in business administration and finance, University of Illinois, 1913. MBA, Harvard University, 1977.

Early career - Joins General Motors Corp. as a factory analyst with the Electro-Motive Division in Chicago, 1973

Current title - Group vice president, General Motors Corp.; president, e-GM, since its inception in August 1999; e-GM is the new business group that puts a wide range of GM products and integrated services closer to customer through Internet-based real-time, interactive and customized relationships.

Immediate prior assignment - Two-year as general manager for the GM North America Car Group, Small Car Operations.