Much of the media coverage of the selection of Mary Barra as CEO of General Motors has focused on the fact that she is a woman. That’s very interesting, but it’s not all of the story. Here are the other elements that are being largely ignored:
–She is part of a generation of GM people who have tasted defeat and they are determined to help GM stage a real turnaround. I would include North American chief Mark Reuss and design chief Ed Welburn in that generation. Yes, they are GM lifers but they represent a fresh new approach to running GM. And no, I don’t think Reuss will jump ship, as widely speculated. His father was a president of GM and the younger Reuss is a complete GM man. No way is he jumping ship.
–The car people are back in charge of GM and the financial/telecom people are out. Thanks to auto czar Steve Rattner, GM was run by two CEOs who had no business running a major automotive company–Ed Whitacre from AT&T and Dan Akerson, who had a background in telecom and private equity. Steve Girsky, a vice chairman from the private equity background, also will step down from that job but retain his seat on the board. The new chairman of the board comes from Cummins, a major engine manufacturer. GM finally has the right leadership in place.
–It’s intriguing that the board chose not to put a financial person in as CEO. That has been a long tradition at GM. Rick Wagoner, whom I wrote about at length in “Why GM Matters,” was a financial maven, continuing a long tradition. I think it is very positive that product people and manufacturing people are now clearly running the company. That’s smart.
–GM is going to get a real bump-up in terms of its image and public relations efforts. Both Whitacre and Akerson were dangerous on the PR front. It was dangerous to put them in front of journalists because they either said stupid or offensive things. But Mary is a charmer and a story teller, as I recounted in “Why GM Matters.” She is authentic as hell. She told me how she graduated from Waterford Mott High School just west of Pontiac, Michigan, in 1980. Her father had been a diemaker at Pontiact for 39 years and she was drawn to cars. “A lot of my friends were working at the local Dairy Queen and places like that,” she told me. “But I was walking into an assembly plant.” She was going to rotate between the plant and the classroom. It doesn’t get any better than that, from a journalistic story-telling perspective.
All in all, it is a smashing moment for Mary Barra and for GM.
