Thread: Car Talk
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-01-01, 16:56

Quote:
Originally Posted by Quagmire View Post
The only "old-guard" exec left at GM is Bob Lutz. The rest are outsiders like Whitacre and Liddell or young executives like Mark Reuss who successfully ran Holden.
From Fortune's Dumbest Moments in Business 2009:

Quote:
GM's closed culture

Almost every executive at General Motors has spent his or her entire working life there, and some say that's part of the troubled automaker's problem.
That's why it seemed noteworthy when CEO Fritz Henderson announced in October that he would find an outsider to fill GM's top North American sales job.

But Henderson didn't seem to look too hard -- just a few hours later, he said he had given the job to Susan Docherty, a GM veteran of more than 20 years.

The automaker eventually looked outside its ranks for a CEO when it pushed Henderson out two months later. It hired GM chairman and former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who has admitted in the past that he knows little about cars.
Let's not forget that Buick/GMC manager Brian Sweeney, who took the position after Michael Richards quit after just nine days on the job, is also a 25-year GM vet. And I'm not even looking, this is just from memory. There's still tons of old blood at GM.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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