ABSTRACT
The launch of a Hughes Aircraft space satellite in 1993 was the start of a high-tech commercial challenge to the cable TV industry by a major American defense company. Once Hughes management made the decision to diversify in 1988 because it saw military spending heading downward, General Motors (GM) capital and credit helped speed the shift into commercial work. Hughes trained key supervisory employees in the basics of commercial markets, without trying to transform the culture of the entire decades-old defense corporation. For its part, Hughes has the strength of GM's abundant assets behind its efforts to break into commercial markets. The Cold War did end, but most of the defense companies that seriously hunted new commercial business—with the main exceptions of Hughes and Bath Iron Works (BIW)—were the smaller subcontractors that showed much more flexibility than the bigger firms they supplied.
