In the dim and distant 1970's, when the General Motors Corporation was still the hands-down world leader in the automobile business and the Japanese were turning out tinny little cars with nothing much to recommend them except great gas mileage, Maryann Keller became known in Detroit, derisively, as ''that girl who loves Japan.'' A Wall Street securities analyst who had looked long and hard at the future of the car industry, Ms. Keller gave speeches - to Motor City executives, to the press, to investors, to anyone who would listen - predicting that, if the Big Three American car makers failed to cut costs dramatically and improve quality, Japanese competitors would soon leave them in the dust. She was widely regarded, or more often disregarded, as a crackpot.
Today, of course, America's highways are chockablock with Hondas, Nissans, Toyotas and Mazdas, G.M.'s market share is in a stubborn six-year slump and Ms. Keller doesn't seem so crazy after all. One virtue of ''Rude Awakening,'' her account of General Motors' recent travails, is its cool, evenhanded tone. Nowhere does she say, or even imply, ''I told you so.''
The temptation to gloat may at times have been formidable: G.M. faced up to the Japanese threat rather late in the game and then tried to solve the problem by throwing money at it. Under the leadership of Roger B. Smith, General Motors in the 80's has seen much upheaval, marked by a joint venture with Toyota, a massive reorganization of the entire corporation, two pricey and troublesome acquisitions and a $45 billion capital spending program. (Yes, that's billion - enough cash, F. Alan Smith, a G.M. executive vice president, once observed, to buy Toyota and Nissan.) All of this was supposed to pit a leaner, nimbler, more technologically sophisticated G.M. against its hard-driving competitors.
It hasn't worked out that way. By 1986, by its own reckoning, G.M. had added $1,500 to the average cost of building a compact car. Billions of dollars' worth of factory-automation equipment, unsuited to its work, has stood idle or been scrapped. Meanwhile, ever-cannier customers yawned at G.M.'s cars, choosing Fords, Chryslers or foreign makes instead. In 1988, General Motors reported record profits, thanks largely to new accounting methods. Ms. Keller notes that keeping the same accounting standards would have shown 1988's so-called record earnings at a startling 40 percent below their previous high in 1984.
To Wall Street and the press, General Motors has often seemed to be lurching along with one foot punching the accelerator to the floor and the other firmly planted on the brake pedal. Time after time, top management trumpeted world-beating innovations in the offing. But General Motors' gigantic bureaucracy, made up of those entrenched legions Mr. Smith calls ''the frozen middle'' of the company, usually had other ideas. Drawing on dozens of interviews, a plethora of published materials and a fascinating array of internal memos, letters and speeches, Ms. Keller examines how G.M. has set its goals and why reality has fallen so far short of strategy. At its best, her analysis vividly illustrates how employees' resistance to change has squashed the strategists' best hopes.
One important example: The joint venture with Toyota that got under way in California in 1983 has yielded Chevy Novas of consistently higher quality than any other model bearing a G.M. nameplate. Yet the experiment, which was intended as a tool for teaching Japanese management techniques to G.M.'s plant bosses, had no appreciable effect on the rest of the company. The reason, according to a consultant who looked into the problem, was that so many old-school plant managers shared ''a defensive conviction that [ these ] techniques can never work in their plant. In the words of one manager, 'All that [ Japanese ] talk is pretty unpopular around here.' ''
To date, only one seasoned alumnus of the Toyota joint venture has been put in charge of a G.M. production plant, and that one is not in the United States but in England. At home, G.M.'s middle managers reluctantly agreed to try a watered-down version of the Japanese team concept; but, in an oversight that smacks of sabotage, the plan was never adequately explained to the United Auto Workers. An ironic and discouraging result was more, not less, friction with labor - which in turn gave ''the frozen middle'' a handy excuse for clinging to its inefficient and adversarial old ways.
So comprehensive a book about the world's largest manufacturing enterprise could easily have been ponderous, the literary equivalent of chomping down an oversize bowl of oat bran. Happily, ''Rude Awakening'' is not only insightful, but fun too. The narrative moves along at a fuel-injected clip, and the book is filled with odd facts. You may not know, for instance, that in 1987 Lee Iacocca seriously considered a takeover of General Motors. Discarding the idea, he remarked that ''it might be easier to buy Greece.''
H. Ross Perot - the vociferous Texas billionaire who founded Electronic Data Systems, sold it to G.M. and then got paid over $700 million to give up his G.M. stock and his seat on the board and go away - makes more than one colorful appearance in these pages. ''I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it,'' he once said. ''At G.M., if you see a snake, the first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you go hire a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Then you talk about it for a year.''
As this book's final chapters make clear, General Motors is still laboring, slowly and painfully, to transform itself into the kind of place where, if you see a snake, you just stomp that sucker. Ms. Keller's shrewd dissection of the monumental difficulties involved is illuminating.