There's a company we're all quite familiar with that has a bit of an issue with brand overlap. It has two or three so-called "core" vehicle lines, but then markets a handful of smaller entities whose value to the company is often unclear at best. And while these brands are each supposed to compete in a clearly defined niche, they in fact tend to cannibalize each other in the marketplace. Exacerbating the problem are the brands' managers, who, rather than thinking of what's best for the entire company, often carve out their own little kingdoms and display open contempt for their so-called superiors in corporate.

The company? Why, Porsche, of course. It now owns 50.1 percent of Volkswagen, which itself controls Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, SEAT, Skoda and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles.

Even a finely tuned organization would be unable to avoid conflicts among multiple luxury and sports car brands, but Porsche/VW is far from finely tuned. If you follow the monthly missives from Georg Kacher, our European Bureau chief, the managerial structure at Porsche/VW more closely resembles a German edition of the sitcom "Arrested Development" than a modern corporation.

And yet, they make money. Volkswagen is now the world's third largest automaker, and Porsche is sitting on a  $20 billion mountain of cash when most automakers can’t afford to keep their factories open. To be sure, there are conflicts, like the Porsche 911 Turbo and the new Audi R8 V10 (left) and there are train wrecks, like the VW Phaeton. But for the most part, VW and now Porsche seem be successfully managing a batch of strong, vital brands - without even trying.

There's a precedent for this sort of illogical success, the one you were all probably thinking of in the first place. In the 1950s and 1960s, General Motors was to the auto market what Google now is to Internet search. And it was an utter mess. Brands shared platforms, but built their own engines and had their own batch of engineers. Megalomaniac brand managers like John Z. DeLorean at Pontiac worked harder at beating Chevrolet than Ford or Dodge. When corporate introduced meek attempts at controlling the mess, like banning big engines in any small vehicle aside from Corvette, the brand managers simply found loopholes, in that particular case a "trim" called GTO (above). It worked. Sales charts in the late 1960s typically listed Chevy in first place, followed by Ford – and then every other GM brand. Plymouth, then Chrysler’s volume line, was sometimes shut out of the top-five by GM’s weaker brands.

Since then, GM has streamlined its brand structure many times over, and more recently integrated its still vast global resources. Those are good things, necessary things. But in the process, it also stripped the brands of their power and centralized the decision making process. This was supposed to reduce overlap, but in fact has resulted in the very inconsistency and hazy identities the brands suffer from today.

Which brings us back to the present. GM is preparing to close, sell, or pare down several of its weak brands as part of its government-mandated reorganization. But as Automotive News recently reported, management has no idea how to do this. And really, which are the "weak" brands?  Sure, Cadillac has shown strong results in the past decade, but only because it got billions in new products and an expensive, Led Zeppelin-powered ad campaign. Who is to say that Buick, Pontiac or Saab wouldn't have enjoyed similar success had they won such support? In effect, GM's own management has determined the winners and losers among its portfolio for so long, that it's impossible to say which are really "weak" or "core" brands.

So here's my restructuring plan for GM: Follow the Porsche/VW model. Not by bringing a squabbling family into RenCen or commissioning an $80,000 Chevrolet Impala, but rather, by empowering the brands.  Find the best people in the company (or outside, if necessary), and give them the authority to actually run a brand. Let them decide how to use the government's bailout money and GM's global parts bin to fill their showrooms. And here's the fun part: if they fail, the brand fails.

Is the idea a bit far fetched? Probably. For one thing, GM doesn't have the time or money to rebuild brand structures it spent decades tearing down. It's also impossible to ignore that while Porsche and Volkswagen seem to do well enough with a plethora of brands, Toyota does just fine with very few. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that the common refrain "too many brands" simply isn't true. GM succeeded because of their many brands and more importantly, the many smart people running them. Porsche should take note, and resist the temptation to "manage" its portfolio from Stuttgart.