General Motors’ much-maligned culture may help rather than hinder the carmaker’s swift transformation into a smaller, leaner organisation, its newly appointed chief restructuring officer said.

Speaking on the eve of a New York bankruptcy court’s likely approval of a plan to create a “new” GM, Al Koch, a turnround specialist at AlixPartners, told the Financial Times that “we accomplished in 100 days what in most major restructurings would have taken a year or more”.