When Mary Barra was named CEO of General Motors, the excitement among long-time General Motors watchers stemmed from the fact that new CEO Mary Barra was not a graduate of GM’s old-boy C-suite network, nor was she a disciple of the automaker’s dysfunctional Treasury Department. She was arguably the best-equipped and best-rounded executive to lead GM in many decades.
She came to the position with the backing of a transient outsider CEO, Dan Akerson, who came to Detroit to run GM post-bankruptcy. David Welch, Bloomberg’s Detroit Bureau Chief and inarguably the most experienced and best-sourced journalist writing today on GM, broke the story that Barra would be the next CEO and has a new book out – “Charging Ahead: GM, Mary Barra and the Reinvention of an American Icon.”
Welch’s insights into GM – through the years, through bankruptcy, through old-guard and new-guard CEOs, through EV1, Bolt, Lyriq and through reorganizations, resizings and humongous rebates – are invaluable and comprehensive. And the shared insights of his sources, which include former CEOs Akerson, Ed Whitacre, Fritz Henderson and many well-placed insiders give us just enough access to GM corridor talk and truth-telling behind the speeches and press releases, to make it a breezy and informative read – just what the doctor ordered at a time when people’s time is short for long reads.
Where Barra appears in the book with quotes that came out of Welch’s interviews with her, her words don’t come with Roman candles or with an internal “a-ha!” But what you do get from the portrait painted by Welch is a straight shooter who knows the pressure she is under to succeed, who doesn’t forget where she came from (her father was a UAW worker) and who is never going to be bulldozed or bullied by alpha men who thinks she crashed the party.
There have been many doubters. Make your way around Detroit’s insular auto industry and you’d hear the whispers that Akerson and the board chose her over CFO Dan Ammann, board member Stephen Girsky and product boss Mark Reuss because they thought she would be sacrificed to absorb the heat from the faulty-ignition lawsuits and congressional inquiries that Welch covers with great detail. But the truth is that it took outsiders like Akerson to come in, become disgusted with GM’s hidebound legacy corporate culture and realize that it was time for someone to lead the company into a new era who had both broad experience inside GM – from running a plant to being an engineer and a human resources chief – and a modest ego and a vision for where the world was going. The last thing GM needed was another clone from GM’s finance department who had gone to Harvard Business School with an understanding of a balance sheet but not how an electric vehicle actually works. Barra attended Kettering University as an undergrad and earned her MBA at Stanford.
To be fair, Barra inherited a very different GM than her predecessors. The overdue heavy lifting was done through the government bailout process and bankruptcy. Hummer, Saab, Pontiac and Saturn were all gone. The enormous health-care obligations of employees and retirees that confounded previous CEOs had been negotiated and left in the “old” GM. The company no longer was relying on mortgage income from General Motors Acceptance Corp., as was the case under one-time CEO Rick Wagoner, to maintain cash flow.
Barra’s accomplishments thus far as outlined in Welch’s book include:
- Communicating to the workforce and Wall Street with a frankness and breadth of knowledge of the operations and product line that has minimized poor outcomes.
- Stopped the production of ego-driven, silly or just flat-out bad and wrongheaded products (e.g., Pontiac Aztek, Chevy SSR, Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Ion, Chevy HHR and Cobalt, etc.)
- Smart commitments to EV transformation without overinvesting too soon, and balancing demand for internal-combustion products today with the need to challenge for leadership in an EV future.
- Simplified the corporate culture from a playbook of byzantine BS to simpler, common-sense ideas, such as when she cut down a lengthy piece of nonsense about dress code to “dress appropriately.”
- Clipped the wings of the GM cost-cutters who often dumbed down products and customer experiences for nickels and dimes only to give it back and then some in incentives. To be fair, former product chief Bob Lutz brought that thinking to GM, but Barra has been far more deft at getting teams to buy in than her predecessors.
- Selling off Opel and making tough decisions about closing plants, such as Lordstown, in the face of tough political pressures from the likes of Donald Trump.
- And in 2017, she made the choice to restructure GM, close plants and cut jobs when GM actually was riding high with profits, angering the UAW and internal fiefdoms rather than wait for the next cycle of doom (which would manifest as the pandemic or semi-conductor shortage).
While change usually comes from outsiders at big, lumbering companies such as GM, give credit to one of those outsiders, Akerson (who got rid of executives’ private bathroom/showers, posh dining room and the dead-CEO portrait gallery), for seeing that a GM lifer like Barra actually was the best choice to bring the automaker into the 21st century and give it a chance to lead the company into the EV era.
An electrical engineer by training, and a woman in a company run by and dominated by alpha men, she was, and may be, the perfect person for the job as an experienced, well-rounded, intelligent, gutsy outsider from within.
And to her credit, she easily could have left GM for Ford, Stellantis or most any company and carved out a prosperous life and retirement for herself. But her roots are at GM and in Southeast Michigan, and that counted and counts with Barra, who is quoted in Welch’s book as saying, “The UAW straightened my teeth.”
She stayed out of an old-school sense of tradition and pride in GM that is as rare as a WolverineShe had it running through her veins and still does.
Barra is not the perfect CEO and here and there still shows signs of falling back on her privilege, such as when she did not return the call from the mayor of Hamtramck, MI, after she made a decision to idle the plant she once managed (It has since been given a new life). Yes, it’s her job to explain to the mayor of a city where you are a major employer that you are wiping out thousands of jobs.
Welch is balanced and does not throw flowers at Barra’s feet. But his experience covering GM shows through when he mines recent events and decisions, applies his analysis and unique vantage point of having covered every wise or wacky move of the last 25 years of GM and paints her as being uniquely suited and qualified to guide GM in the electrified 21st century.
