For the first time in the nearly 130-year existence of the automobile industry, a woman soon will lead a major automaker. Mary Barra will become CEO of General Motors on January 15. Barra, executive vice president of global product development, was elected by the company’s board of directors to replace CEO and chairman Dan Akerson, who said today he wanted to step down after his wife was diagnosed with cancer. The announcement comes one day after the U.S. Treasury completed its final sale of GM shares, ending a four-year government stake that lost $10.5 billion.
Four of the 14 GM board members are women, two of whom were appointed by the U.S. Treasury in 2009 after the company declared bankruptcy and converted $49.5 billion in government loans to stock.
“I’m honored to lead the best team in the business and to keep our momentum at full speed,” Barra said in a statement.
Barra, a 33-year GM veteran who started as an engineering intern at Pontiac, has been lauded for cutting the company’s fat. In 2011, Akerson promoted Barra to her current role from vice president of human resources and since August she has been running the company’s global supplier networks and purchasing agreements. Barra, 51, may be best known for reducing the number of executives who approve model changes—a longstanding problem at GM—from three to one.
Mary Barra will replace Dan Akerson as CEO of GM in January.
“It was like watching your daughter graduate from college,” Akerson said in a conference call. “I’m very proud that she’s going to lead this company going forward. I’m very confident she’ll do a good job.”
GM had expected Akerson, who is 65, to step down when it released the CEO’s 2012 compensation details in April. At that time, Akerson’s stock options were changed to vest immediately instead of in three years because of the “possibility of his retirement,” according to an SEC filing. Since Akerson took over as CEO in September 2010, the Treasury has capped his pay at about half of what Ford CEO Alan Mulally and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne have taken home. In 2012, Akerson made $9 million without stock options.
“I thought this was a great iconic company, and the taxpayers of Canada and the United States stood up in our darkest hour and I thought we had to deliver on that promise,” Akerson said. “I wanted to see, particularly, the U.S. government exit on their timescale, not mine.”
- Feature: The Detroit Three After the Big Whoa—An Examination of Domestic Carmakers
- First Drive: 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Convertible
- Instrumented Test: 2014 Cadillac CTS Vsport Twin-Turbo V-6
Akerson, a telecom and private-equity executive who headed Nextel, was appointed by the Treasury in June 2009 as part of the government’s representation on the GM board. He was installed as the company’s fourth CEO in 18 months the following year, having succeeded Ed Whitacre, Fritz Henderson, and Rick Wagoner, who the White House explicitly asked to resign before handing over billions more in loans.
Two months after becoming CEO, Akerson took GM public in the biggest initial public offering in U.S. history and, like many automakers after the recession, returned his outfit to profitability and greater sales. He is also credited for successfully negotiating with the United Auto Workers, which became GM’s second-largest shareholder, for reduced pensions and wages.
“We have to continue to execute and put the customer central to everything we do,” he said. “We’ve reformed, I think, General Motors and as far as we’ve come, we’ve got to go that far again.”
No comments:
Post a Comment