Story first appeared in the DetroitNews.com.
Mary Barra is blazing more than one trail on her way to becoming the next CEO of General Motors Co., effective next month.
After
five years of outsiders guiding the Motor City’s automakers back from
the brink of extinction, the appointment of the 51-year-old GM veteran
marks the return of a native Detroiter to an industry C-suite — and
signals that a humbling crisis finally is giving way to a new generation
of leaders tasked with executing business fundamentals and winning.
Not
that the new gig will be easy for Barra, considered an up-and-comer
since her days in the 1990s as former CEO Jack Smith’s assistant. It
won’t be, because the leadership change accelerated by Chairman Dan
Akerson’s need to care for an ailing wife is about more than Barra or
the historic fact that she will be the first woman to head a global
automaker.
It’s about ensuring GM’s future continues to distance
itself from the bad habits of its past. As much as the new boss will
need to prove she’s got the mettle to run the whole show, GM will need
to demonstrate that the next crop of leaders can work as a team to keep
GM moving in a direction that impresses customers and satisfies
investors at the same time.
“Team trumps talent,” Akerson said
Tuesday in remarks describing the leadership change. “If you can’t run
the play we call, then there isn’t a place for you. Mary is an adaptive
personality, one who adapts to change well. We’ve tried to adopt a
culture here of team instead of personality.”
Dan Ammann, the
41-year-old chief financial officer and relative newcomer to GM, becomes
president with responsibility for the automaker’s regional businesses
and its restructured financial operations. Mark Reuss, gearhead-in-chief
and president of GM North America, replaces Barra as head of global
product development.
GM’s leadership moves may be surprising to
casual observers, particularly the promotion of Barra. But they’re
largely predictable to students of the company attuned to the unofficial
leadership race, the bias to elevate an insider and Akerson’s public
comments, chiefly his remarks that it was “inevitable” that a “car gal”
would soon head a Detroit automaker.
“It seems to me the board
has really been savvy this time,” said Marina v.N. Whitman, a former
chief economist for GM and now professor of business administration and
public policy at the University of Michigan. “Mary Barra is clearly
future-oriented.”
Meaning what? As GM’s chief product boss, she
worked to discern what customers would want, not to deliver what the
company thought they should have. As head of global HR, she witnessed
first-hand the changing priorities in young ambition and stultifying
effects of allowing mid-level problems to block paths to advancement and
change.
But there’s more to succession planning
accelerated because Akerson’s wife, Karin, was diagnosed this fall with
late-stage cancer. The new executive lineup had been taking shape for
months behind the scenes, the result being a group that seems designed
to simultaneously leverage individual strengths to complement the whole.
In
a bid to maintain GM’s momentum and bolster its credibility on Wall
Street, the company’s directors appear to be executing the automotive
equivalent of “best available athlete” for a leadership team that will
pick up where the federal bailout and the “Government Motors” rap leaves
off.
CEO goes to an engineering-trained veteran of 33 years with
a demonstrated record of building consensus, leading a team, exhibiting
empathy when needed and toughness when required. President goes to a
foreign-born Wall Street hand, Ammann, whose stature and record of
disciplined financial management at GM instill confidence with
investors.
And global product goes to the Michigan-born,
locally-reared son of a former GM president ousted in the boardroom coup
that culminated in the Jack Smith era at GM. By all accounts, Mark
Reuss was a contender for the top job, but his new gig is likely to
prove a winner for GM’s improving product cred.
GM’s leadership
shake-up may not necessarily be cause for celebration, but it
nonetheless marks the end of a painful era and the beginning of a new
one. The U.S. Treasury on Monday sold its final share in the automaker,
and one day later came a new leadership trio disproportionately staffed
with two Detroiters who thrived in the crucible of the past five years
and emerged on top.
There will be critics, as there always are of
whatever decision GM chooses to make. Such as: not good; Vice-Chairman
Steve Girsky is stepping away from his executive role even as he’ll keep
his seat on the board. Or it’s too soon for Barra; she never ran a
region, like Europe or Asia-Pacific.
She’s “very good at product
development,” Warren Browne, a former GM executive in Europe and now
vice president of business development for AutomotiveCompass LLC, wrote
in an email. But she has “no regional experience” and “no financial
experience.”
The record of the past five years suggests a
different lesson: Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally neither worked abroad
nor served as a CFO. And yet he’s the rock star credited with leading
the Blue Oval’s effort to save itself, to re-establish the credibility
of American manufacturing and to do it with a team culled from the best
of Detroit.
