For a second time, I sat opposite Roger Smith, trying not to let astonishment show on my face. The first time had been across a wooden picnic table in the California sunshine, when he asked, out of the blue and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, if I would consider becoming a vice president and chief economist at GM. This time it was across the broad mahogany desk that set the stiffly formal, top-executive tone of his fourteenth-floor office in Detroit's GM Building. I was enjoying the challenges of the job Roger had offered at that earlier meeting and had never thought past it, certainly not in terms of moving beyond the responsibilities grounded in my economics background into an entirely new world of general management.
The promotion Roger dangled before me was a significant step up, to vice president and group executive for Public Affairs, a group of four staffs, each with its own vice president. Not only did it send a strong signal that I had performed well so far in my foray into the corporate world, but it would also make me the highest-ranking female in the US automobile industry, a notoriously male preserve at the time. More important, it would give me the chance to influence GM's relationships with some of its increasingly important stakeholders: its headquarters and plant communities; national, state, and local governments; environmentalists; and, at least indirectly through public relations, actual and potential customers.
Roger Smith presented me with this opportunity on a Friday; he told me to think about it over the weekend and let him know my decision on Monday. When I broached the subject with Bob, I immediately started to dither and whine about uprooting the household once again, moving us from our Princeton home to an unfamiliar part of the world—Greater Detroit—about which we'd heard only depressing tales, and sticking him with yet another commute to Pittsburgh. Bob interrupted me in midsentence. “Look,” he said, “the kids and I can adapt to any choice you make, but the one thing we can't handle is having you spread your guilt all over us.” During the decades since, I have passed that piece of wisdom along to several woman friends agonizing over similar career-family decisions, and every one of them found it as invaluable and reassuring as I had.
Bob did have one nonnegotiable demand, though; we had to live in a community with a university and a good research library. That eliminated the elegant suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, the usual choices of high-level GM executives. It didn't take us long to agree that the natural place for us would be Ann Arbor, some thirty-five miles west of Detroit and home of the University of Michigan. After some intensive house-hunting we found a handsome red brick colonial in a neighborhood not far from the university, ablaze with flowering trees and blooming plants in the brief but lovely Michigan spring. Because I care about the touches generally found in older homes—plaster borders on ceilings, hardwood floors—I had always said that any house we bought had to be at least as old as I was. This one just made it; we had both started life in 1935.
We were totally unprepared for Ann Arbor's midwestern hospitality; within twenty-four hours of the moving truck's departure neighbors appeared on our doorstep with casseroles or bottles of wine, and we quickly began to develop a circle of friends that has grown steadily during the years since. Thus began our love affair with Ann Arbor, which has lasted well beyond my retirement from General Motors and in total contradiction to our long-standing expectation that we would retire either to Bob's hometown, Cambridge, or mine, Princeton.
Although I had been working for GM for six years, and had spent quite a bit of time in Detroit for meetings, I was still in for a new set of culture shocks. Living outside the usual GM orbit was regarded as a bit peculiar. When I told Roger Smith where we would be living, he only remarked, “You'll be driving into the sun both ways, east in the morning and west in the evening.” But I could tell that he was surprised and mildly disapproving. And when a public relations executive asked me which country club I would like to join, I mentioned the rather modest tennis and swimming club down the street from our new home. A few days later the man came back, puzzled and embarrassed, to report that there was no way he could move us to the head of the queue. We would just have to wait our turn, a situation that would never have arisen if we had settled in a proper GM community.
The biggest ripple caused by my arrival on the fourteenth floor, in addition to my gender, was my choice of a secretary. These executive secretaries were not only highly paid but wielded considerable power, which flowed through to them from their bosses' positions. In return, they kept even longer hours than the workaholics they served, did whatever they were asked, whether it was work related or not, and maintained absolute discretion regarding their bosses' personal lives. Some of them shopped for Christmas presents for their bosses' wives or typed and edited term papers for their children. Elmer Johnson's secretary managed his household accounts, paid his bills, and even held the key to his safe-deposit box. Alan Smith's made daily trips to his Bloomfield Hills home to tend to the family cats while he was away running GM of Canada, even though she was temporarily assigned to work for someone else.
The GM rule was that executives were not allowed to take their secretaries with them when they were promoted, on the sensible grounds that secretaries' career tracks should be independent of their bosses'. But when I selected the most competent secretary in the Detroit offices of the Economics staff to move upstairs with me, I knew that no one would dare refuse my request, any more than the women who reported to my mother in the shop that built radar sets during World War II would have dared to vote no when they were asked to decide whether they would be willing to have “Negroes” work alongside them. Gloria Pearson, a smart and savvy Detroit native and single mother, would be the first African American secretary on the executive floor. I chose her for her impressive skills; her sharp wit came along for free. When I asked her how a black girl from inner-city Detroit wound up as a student at Brandeis University, a Jewish school on the outskirts of Boston, she instantly replied “white liberal guilt.” But she was immensely proud that, between us, we had broken through two hitherto impregnable barriers to the fourteenth floor. Her loyalty to and high expectations of me were downright intimidating.
The other executive secretaries gave Gloria the cold shoulder when she first arrived, as much because she was an outsider to their tightly knit group as because of her color. But they soon came to appreciate her intelligence, competence, and keen sense of humor; she eventually became the recognized leader of the group. She was also an early and enthusiastic adopter of computerized office skills when desktop personal computers became available. Having this buffer between my Luddite backwardness and the brave new world made possible by my father's pioneering work was invaluable, but it also led occasionally to a hilarious blooper. Gloria's faith in the spell-check function made her careless about proofreading. Once, reading over a letter I was about to sign, I called to her, “Gloria, it isn't a good idea to leave the l out of public affairs.”
If only I could have adjusted to life on the fourteenth floor as readily as Gloria did! While I was based in New York, I had dealt with the GM culture from a safe distance; in Detroit I had to confront it face-to-face as I struggled to define my new role. The main function of the group executive responsible for public affairs, as I saw it, was to identify and articulate a vision for the group and then push in every possible way to help bring that vision alive. The vision I articulated for the Public Affairs Group was to provide “windows on the world” for GM. This included “windows out,” counseling management on trends and events in the world outside GM, their likely impact on the company, and how it should respond. It also included “windows in,” representing GM's situation, viewpoints, and interests to the rest of the world. “More crudely put,” I said, “we're advocates outside and nags inside.”
There was a world of difference between this high-flown language and the day-to-day realities I had to deal with, starting with my new boss. As chief economist, I had reported to Alan Smith, although much of my interaction was directly with Roger Smith, with whom Alan shared a last name but no family relationship. Short, compact, and silver haired, Alan possessed not only a first-class financial mind but also a wry sense of humor that occasionally burst through the cautious bureaucratic style honed over a lifelong career at GM. The Public Affairs staffs, though, reported to Vice Chairman Howard Kehrl, a living example of the operation of the Peter Principle, which holds that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to the level of his or her incompetence. Howard presumably rose through the ranks on the strength of his engineering talents, but as a top-ranking general executive, he was a disaster. A compulsive micromanager, he demanded that every word or action be checked and rechecked several times by successive layers of management, up to and including himself, with the result that no one who reported to him took full responsibility for anything.
No one had his head more deeply buried in the sand than Howard, hiding from the truth about Japanese competition. When a young member of the Economics staff returned from Japan with firsthand knowledge of the Toyota production system (which came to be called “lean production”), I lobbied hard to have him present his findings to top management. Although some of us had been struggling for several years to alert them to the truth about GM's competitive disadvantage, this would be the first time that they would be hearing such a report “from the front.” After the presentation ended, the silence was broken by Howard Kehrl, saying, “We can't have something in GM called the Toyota Production System.” To my horrified astonishment, there was no follow-up discussion of what the group had just seen, or its implications for GM.
Howard's refusal to recognize the superiority of Japanese production and labor-management methods was impervious to evidence. When he learned that Toyota and Honda were planning to build plants in the United States, he responded, “Just let them come here and try to work with American labor. We'll push ’em back into the sea.” And, when I tried to persuade him that restricting auto imports would ultimately stand in the way of GM's plans to become a more global company, his answer was that it was only US production and sales that really mattered to the company's bottom line. This reflected hindsight but no foresight. In 1985, when Howard made this comment, some 70 percent of GM's vehicle output was produced and sold domestically. But the trend was downward; twenty years later GM was producing and selling more cars and trucks outside the United States than it did at home.1
Adjusting to Howard Kehrl's management style was difficult enough, but I was even more rattled that my previous boss, Alan Smith, had deliberately cut off all access after I no longer reported to him. Time and time again, I tried to make an appointment to see him to discuss something that either required his approval or on which I wanted to get his advice. But the appointment never materialized, and his door remained firmly closed to me, even though his office was only around the corner from mine and we passed each other in the hallway at least once a day. This humiliating exclusion underscored once again the extremes to which the GM culture carried the compartmentalization and constricted communications against which I did daily battle.
If the viselike grip of the GM culture made relationships with my superiors difficult, it also complicated my relationships with the Public Affairs vice presidents, formerly my colleagues, who now reported to me. They were all loyal GM stalwarts, committed to supporting the company's success as they saw it. Yet each, in their own way, resisted both change and my leadership in trying to integrate their talents into a coherent and effective group.
Betsy Ancker-Johnson, vice president of the Environmental Activities staff, was a solid-state physicist with several patents to her credit, only the third woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and the first female presidential appointee in the Department of Commerce. Petite and blonde, with a stern, schoolmarm expression, she was a woman with guts. When, in the early 1950s, no first-rate physics department in the United States would accept a woman as a doctoral candidate, Betsy learned German and earned her PhD. in physics at the University of Tübingen. Barely five feet tall, she loved to drive GM's huge commercial trucks at the company's proving ground. She used her small stature to lobby GM to install adjustable seat belts that would protect children and small adults without threatening to choke them. And, under her leadership, GM won a number of awards from environmental organizations.
The problem with Betsy, from my point of view, was that the same stubbornness that had enabled her to overcome so many obstacles made her as formidable a defender of her turf as any member of the old boys' network. When downsizing and streamlining became the order of the day throughout GM, every effort to get Betsy to comply was countered with a dire warning about how any reduction in her staff's head count would put GM in serious jeopardy of failing to comply fully with the elaborate network of safety, environmental, and fuel-efficiency regulations that engulfed it. None of my superiors, from the chairman on down, was any more successful in taking her on than I was. It was only after she retired that some much-needed reorganization and streamlining of the activities she supervised could occur.
Jim Johnston, the vice president of Industry-Government Relations, was a former Foreign Service officer who knew just about everyone in the nation's capital of importance to the auto industry and, with his affable personality and remarkable memory for names and personal details, was well liked by people on both sides of the legislative aisle and on different sides of controversial issues. Jim and his wife, Margaret, actively followed through on the commitment to social justice that arose from their deeply held Catholic faith. But, as GM's chief lobbyist, he saw protecting the current GM product plan as his primary obligation. That conviction placed him squarely in the path of a collision between the social and competitive pressures on the US auto industry on the one hand and management's bullheaded response on the other.
Society's expectations of the industry, reflected in countless regulations, were increasing every year. And the influx of Japanese vehicles, in addition to sharpening the competition for customers, brought with it better average fuel efficiency than GM and Ford, with their traditional reliance on larger vehicles for profitability, could match. And, although many of the innovations in safety, pollution control, and fuel efficiency had been developed by General Motors, these features didn't always promise a rapid return on the investment needed to put them into its vehicles. So the company headed by Roger Smith, a finance man in every fiber of his being, dragged its feet on introducing many of these improvements into its cars and trucks.
During a period when cost reduction took primacy over other goals and later, when the company's new president, Lloyd Reuss, announced that GM's policy would be to lag rather than lead in introducing safety and fuel-efficiency advances into vehicles because “that's not what the customers care most about,” Jim was forced into an awkward position. He insisted that the company should resist admitting the reality of man-made global warming well after most climate scientists, including his colleague Betsy Ancker-Johnson, were persuaded of its existence. I tried to convince him to acknowledge the growing evidence, but his stubbornness on the matter, combined with the primary role he played in defending the company's interests on a wide variety of policy issues, put him at odds with my efforts to make GM's management see realistically the challenges its future held, and to persuade the outside world that the company was playing a role in environmentally friendly innovation.
The person I brought in to succeed me as chief economist was George Eads, then dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and formerly high up in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. George had both a superb analytical brain and, it turned out, some creative views on how to streamline the Economics staff while making it more efficient and effective. He also had something I lacked: a lifelong love and expert knowledge of cars. But George's interest in public affairs issues took a backseat to his desire to move to a line job with responsibility for one of GM's business units. His openly critical mind did not fit comfortably with the GM culture, and when he saw that he wasn't going to get the kind of position he craved, he left GM, a disappointed and frustrated man.
Jack McNulty, the vice president of Public Relations, was a very different sort. A hard-drinking, florid-faced man with a hard-edged New York accent, he was outspoken in expressing views that made his listeners shudder. He made no bones about the fact that it didn't sit well with him to report to a woman, although he would do his best. His thoughts on how to reach out to potential African American customers were that they were “a great market for used Cadillacs.” He encouraged the three-martini lunch, by example as well as quips, and I discovered that the alcoholism rife in his staff was a subject of crude jokes among the Detroit-based press corps. My efforts to change this destructive environment came to naught, at least partly because I couldn't get support from those above me in the chain of command.
I realized how big a problem I had with trying to integrate the Public Affairs staffs into a meaningful group when I found it almost impossible to call a meeting with the four vice presidents. Basically, each wanted to be left alone to manage his or her own staff in pursuit of the goals outlined in its business plan. My efforts to hold monthly meetings to talk about ways to maximize synergies so as to make the whole group more effective met with fierce bureaucratic resistance. Something more important invariably interfered with any schedule I tried to set, and I had to demand attendance, which flatly contradicted my effort to position myself as a leader and facilitator rather than a command-and-control boss. When downsizing became a companywide exercise, each vice president offered good reasons why the reductions should come from somewhere other than his or her own staff. I managed to keep my composure during these discussions but in the privacy of my office, I pounded the desk and mumbled profanities to vent my frustration.
The GM culture confronted me everywhere I turned. Jack McNulty ostensibly reported to me, but his real role was as Roger Smith's personal publicist. Roger was extremely conscious of his public image and very defensive about anything that might cast him in a negative light. That set the tone for GM public relations. Any journalist who dared to write something critical about GM or its chairman invited the threat that the company would withdraw its advertising from the offending publication, which it often did. Company spokesmen responded to difficult questions with carefully worded boilerplate.
One of Public Relations' toughest challenges was caused by the wide release in 1989 of Michael Moore's first hit film, Roger and Me. Moore used a combination of manipulation, caricature, half truths, and brilliant comic timing to contrast Roger Smith's pampered lifestyle with the abject misery into which GM's decision to close several plants had cast the citizens of Flint, Michigan. The movie was a sensational hit, setting Moore and his signature baseball cap on the road to fame and fortune. When a reporter asked for GM's reaction to the film, a spokesman replied haughtily that no one in GM would stoop so low as to buy a ticket!
Another major confrontation with the Public Relations staff arose when it didn't take kindly to my attempts to enforce a GM rule that forbade employees from accepting gifts of significant value from the firm's suppliers. The general knowledge that the company's chairman had enjoyed several excursions on Malcolm Forbes's luxurious yacht and had been a guest at his multi-million-dollar birthday bash in the Arabian desert, despite the fact that GM was a major buyer of advertising space in Forbes magazine, undermined my efforts. Things came to a head at the splashy Teamwork and Technology show, a pet project of Roger's, which highlighted GM's innovations and current and future products, held at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel.
When I arrived in my room, I found an enormous box from Tiffany's and, nestled inside, a very expensive Steuben crystal vase. My first thought was “That will make a fine wedding present for someone.” Then came my second: “Good Lord, we're not allowed to accept these from the hotel that's selling us the space and services for our show.” A call to the manager elicited the information that every GM executive in the hotel had received the same gift. “Well,” I said, “you'll have to figure out how to take them back.”
The result was a knock from housekeeping on every executive's door. Where rooms were empty and the gifts still wrapped, they were retrieved. But no one, including me, had the nerve to insist on recapture when it required a face-to-face explanation, so a few vases escaped. When we got back to Detroit, my vice presidents had to listen to yet another explanation from me about the rules forbidding gifts, and, to the best of my knowledge, the practice more or less halted among those who reported to me. But the chairman's proclivity for setting himself above the rules continued to pervade the corporate culture, behavior that flew in the face of the values I had been taught to regard as basic.
Meanwhile, I used talks, interviews, op-ed pieces in leading newspapers, and congressional testimony to fulfill my personal role as both a nag inside and an advocate outside the company. The world I described on the other side of the “windows out” was being shaped by the rapid globalization of the automobile industry; the increasing diversity of the many publics, or stakeholders, with which GM interacted; and the heightened expectations for corporate good citizenship. These developments demanded that GM find creative ways to integrate its business goals with political and social agendas. The competition from Japanese producers was just the beginning, I warned, as more and more developing nations—of which Korea was the first—were positioning themselves to join the competitive fray. And, finally, the success of the Japanese-owned “transplant” facilities in the United States should have hammered home the message that geography is not destiny, that it is management that bears the primary responsibility for competitive success.
One of my most important tasks as an advocate for GM—the “windows in” part—was testifying before congressional committees and subcommittees. Every detail of these hearings was designed to intimidate the witness, who sat at a wooden table, facing the committee members. These inquisitors were ranged along an elevated dais well above our level, forcing us to look up constantly as we read our scripts and reminding us, as if we needed reminding, where the power lay. The committee chairman gave each witness a strict time limit, often reinforced by a light that changed from green to yellow to red as the deadline approached. I learned not to take either one questioner's encouragement or another's withering hostility personally; what mattered was not me as an individual on the dock but the position or interest group I represented and how my questioner could best score his own points with the audience and, more important, the next day's newspaper accounts.
The subject on which I testified most often was the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which required each manufacturer's fleet of vehicles to meet or exceed a specified average miles-per-gallon number. During the decade in which these requirements were being phased in, from 1975 to 1985, fuel prices were generally high or rising, pushing customers to want smaller vehicles, and the US manufacturers had no difficulty in meeting the steadily tightening mileage standards. The average mileage of passenger vehicles doubled, from 13.5 to 27.5 miles per gallon, and for light trucks it increased by more than 50 percent.2
But when gasoline prices fell, in the second half of the 1980s, customers once again favored larger and less fuel efficient vehicles. Then the standards began to bite hard on full-line producers like GM and Ford, which were torn between the mileage requirements and the desire to stem their decline in market share by selling more of the larger and more profitable vehicles customers wanted. Meanwhile, our Japanese competitors, whose production was naturally weighted toward the smaller vehicles suited to their crowded home country, faced no such difficulties and, in fact, had room under the standards to make their fleets less fuel-efficient by moving up-market to larger, more luxurious vehicles.
I testified in favor of loosening the CAFE standards more times than I care to remember, but the main points of my argument were always the same: that the standards failed all three relevant criteria, being neither effective, efficient, nor fair. Just about every economist who has looked at the issue agrees that specific “command-and-control” regulations like CAFE are the least desirable and costliest policies to use in pushing to maximize energy security and/or minimize production of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In fact, gasoline consumption per capita actually rose in the United States during the 1980s, as consumers more than offset increases in fuel efficiency by acquiring more cars per family and driving more miles in the course of a year.3 A broad-based energy tax, I argued, would create the right signals to influence consumer behavior and would meet the triple test that CAFE failed.4
I got to play offense rather than just defense as an advocate for the US automakers when I was appointed by President Reagan to the private-sector advisory group to the US Trade Representative. I stressed that what American manufacturing industries needed from the US agency charged with trade issues was, above all, a reduction in uncertainty through stabilized rules, along with pressure on other countries to open their markets to US products and eliminate burdensome “performance requirements.” These requirements, imposed mainly by developing countries, demanded that any foreign firm that wanted to produce and sell there had to meet a number of rigid conditions such as generating a specified volume of exports or employing nationals of the host country as a required share of its workforce.
My biggest impact on US trade negotiations, though, came in the task force formed to lay out objectives for the negotiations with Canada and Mexico that culminated in the North American Free Trade Agreement. My efforts were focused on ensuring that the provisions related to the automobile industry, which dominated US trade in manufactures with both Mexico and Canada and was treated as a special case in the agreement, met the demands of the Big Three American auto firms. These companies were ultimately successful in achieving provisions that treated them favorably in comparison with their Japanese competitors, while at the same time phasing out most of Mexico's rigid performance requirements.
I found myself playing an ambassadorial role within the company as well when I became secretary of the Public Policy Committee of GM's Board of Directors, the committee charged with monitoring GM's outlook and behavior on important issues of public policy. This seemed like an ideal assignment for someone with my interest and background in relationships between public issues and the private sector. But it was marred by the fact that my role as liaison quickly turned into that of mediator in an ongoing struggle.
The tension arose from Roger Smith's determination to keep GM's board under iron control, by making sure that it received only the information he wanted it to have and allowing virtually no time for discussion in board meetings. He also attended the meetings of those board committees he regarded as important, to ensure that no potentially troublesome discussions bubbled up from them. He didn't bother to attend meetings of the Public Policy Committee, which he regarded as the least relevant to the actual running of the business. In assigning the committee responsibilities of each outside director, he allocated to the Public Policy Committee not only people with a genuine interest and expertise in issues like safety, environmental impact, protection of employees, and relationships with plant communities but also those who he thought might be troublemakers on more important committees. Chief among the latter was Ross Perot.
The result of Roger's maneuvering was that the members of the Public Policy Committee decided that theirs was the only venue where directors could discuss an issue freely and thoroughly, without Roger's domineering presence. As a result, they were constantly demanding background information on, and a chance to ask tough questions about, matters that were not really issues of public policy at all but were at the core of GM's business decisions and their effect on the company's profitability and long-run viability. These included issues like the quality of the company's vehicles in comparison with its competitors' and the relationship between the firm and the dealers who were its direct link with consumers.
I tried to respond to the demands of the committee members that such issues be placed on its agenda, but their often critical comments and suggestions tended to be ignored by Smith and those executives who did his bidding. This only increased the committee's frustration and hostility toward management, while the background papers prepared by various GM staffs became increasingly defensive. And on subjects that were appropriately within the committee's purview, members sent numerous signals, through me, of their dissatisfaction with some of the company's policies. Don't undermine your credibility on CAFE, they warned, by overstating its negative aspects. Regarding safety, they asked, why didn't the other GM divisions follow Cadillac's lead in advertising safety, and why was the company so slow in introducing safety innovations into its products? I began to feel like a marriage counselor, trying to get each side to understand the other's position and prevent the tensions from erupting into open warfare.
The company's deteriorating situation in the second half of the 1980s cried out for innovations that would extend the reach of our public affairs mandate. The most urgent one, to my mind, came out of GM's announcement, toward the end of 1986, that it would be closing several plants in the near future. To soften the devastating effects that such closings were sure to have on the communities in which these plants were often the largest employer would require pulling together and coordinating all the relevant knowledge, expertise, and decision-making ability that was scattered throughout the company.
I did it by championing the creation of a Corporate Community Transition Team (CCTT), with representatives from various corporate staffs, as well as the major business units. This group had no role in deciding which plants would be closed or when, nor did we focus on layoff or relocation arrangements for GM employees, most of whom were covered by union contracts. Our concern was with alleviating the impacts on families and communities that Michael Moore had caricatured so devastatingly in Roger and Me.
One of the worst aspects of the situation was that the size of GM's contribution to the United Way charitable organization in each plant city was keyed to the number of people it employed there. If this rule had been applied to communities where plants were completely shuttered, GM's corporate contributions would have ended at exactly the time when laid-off employees' personal contributions were also plummeting, while the need for United Way services shot up. Instead, the CCTT persuaded the company to cushion the shock by phasing out its contributions over several years, a policy that has since been adopted by other large companies in communities where they shut down operations, including the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer when it closed its research facilities in my hometown of Ann Arbor.
The efforts of the CCTT couldn't dispel the bitterness created by plant closings. Although GM did win several lawsuits for “breach of contract” brought by affected communities, it became a poster child for many of the ills that befell communities heavily reliant on old-line manufacturing. One of the most emotionally wrenching encounters in my role as chairman of that committee was a meeting with the mayor of one of the cities strung northward from Detroit along the I-75 corridor—cities like Pontiac and Flint and Saginaw. In each of these cities, the GM plant was the biggest employer in town and, when the plants were built and expanded, they had attracted a large northward migration of African Americans from the rural South, drawn by the prospect of good wages for men with little formal education. Over the decades, the children and grandchildren of some of these original migrants rose to positions of responsibility in their communities; by 1986, several of the I-75 cities had elected black mayors, and these officials bore the brunt of coping with the social and economic repercussions of plant closings.
The unhappy mayor came to talk to me soon after the plant closings in his community were announced. The formality of his dress and manner matched the formality of my office, and he sat stiffly in one of its elegant chairs. He was unfailingly polite and soft spoken, but what he said made me sit bolt upright. That many of his constituents were angry and frustrated, and were venting their fury on him as a handy target, was no surprise. But, he added, many of them believed that the fact that their cities had been targeted for plant closings reflected GM's hostility toward African Americans and the cities where they were now leaders. That did shake me up.
I assured him that nothing could be further from the truth, that far from wishing its minority employees, suppliers, and dealers ill, GM had a variety of programs to encourage their participation in its business. But because so many of the workers in our Michigan plants were African American, this group was particularly vulnerable when shrinking plant capacity became essential to the company's survival. I recalled that when I first joined the company, one of the briefers plying me with facts about my new employer had told me, with evident pride, that GM accounted for some 98 percent of the manufacturing employment in Flint. “Good Lord,” I thought to myself then, “that's a catastrophe waiting to happen.” But, deep down, I knew that the mayor I tried to explain all this to left without feeling he was taking with him a story that could dispel his constituents' suspicions, and I felt embarrassed and helpless.
I found myself in this painful position because I had moved up just as GM's fortunes plunged. When I was promoted to the Public Affairs job in 1985, the firm had appeared to be in great shape, having earned record profits and claimed 44 percent of all US car sales the previous year. In reality, though, it was perched at the edge of a cliff. In the words of two longtime observers of the industry at the Wall Street Journal, “On the three measures of success that mattered—quality, manufacturing efficiency, and new product design—GM by 1985 was dead last in the industry.”5 It didn't take these failings long to hit GM's bottom line: the very next year operating profits and cash reserves plunged, the company lost nearly five points of market share, and Ford out-earned GM for the first time since the Great Depression.
As went the company's fortunes, so went the reputation of its chairman. Roger Smith had appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine with the title “The Innovator: The Creative Mind of Roger Smith” in 1985;6 by 1987, he was seen as the “archvillain” of American industry. Eventually, I was able to give my own balanced evaluation of him as neither hero nor villain, and thereby did him a favor he never knew about. When Roger was about to retire, I received a call from a childhood friend who was then a dean at the University of Michigan and chairman of the committee that nominated its honorary degree recipients. The university wanted to award an honorary degree to Roger Smith, one of its most notable graduates and, it was hoped, a potentially generous donor. But the faculty and student members of the committee, with the image of Roger and Me fresh in their in their minds, were firmly opposed. Could I write a letter, the dean asked, that might turn the views of some of them around?
Finding words to describe Roger in the best possible light while remaining honest took careful thought. In the letter I wrote, I described him as a corporate visionary, admitting that “His vision is not perfect (he himself has discussed what he would do differently…), he has not always communicated it as broadly and effectively as he might, and the returns are not yet in.” I tackled head-on the fact that the film Roger and Me had, not surprisingly, engendered some lively discussion regarding his suitability to receive the University of Michigan's highest honor. “[He] has struggled with two major issues,” I wrote. “One is how to respond to the dislocations that occur when Schumpeter's ‘gales of creative destruction’ blow through. The second is how GM can best balance its commitments to its multiple stakeholders…Each one of us, second-guessing Roger Smith's leadership in handling these overwhelming questions, would undoubtedly disagree with some aspect of his response or his balancing of claims. But one must recognize the magnitude and the seriousness of his effort.”7 That April, Roger Smith received an honorary degree from his alma mater.
I tried to put a brave face on the sudden shifts in GM's fortunes and reputation, telling a reporter, “I thought I was going to work for a big company in a stable industry, but it's been a real roller-coaster ride, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”8 As time passed, though, and the roller-coaster kept heading downward, I began to find the ride more emotionally wearing than exhilarating. Just how low GM had sunk, in reputation, competitive position, and financial results, became crystal clear to the eight hundred executives gathered for the company's triennial executive conference in 1986. These three-day gatherings of the company's elite were traditionally held at the luxurious Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, with participants' time divided between self-congratulatory presentations on the company's state of affairs and every possible form of outdoor recreation, led by golf and fishing. My chief memory of the first such event I attended, in 1979, was my red-faced embarrassment when I managed to crack my two front teeth with my own tennis racket, playing at the first GM Greenbrier event that included a woman.
The 1986 meeting couldn't have been more different. It was moved from the Greenbrier to the workaday environment of GM's Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, despite a huge expenditure in cancellation costs, when it became clear that meeting in the lap of luxury would infuriate our employees and shareholders alike. The tone of the “Techbrier,” as it was instantly dubbed, was somber in the extreme, with one top executive after another outlining the various dimensions of our difficulties and the steepness of the hill we had to climb to return to profitability.
President Jim McDonald spoke words never before uttered in a GM executive conference when he told the group, “I don't really feel that I can say I'm proud of you, because we have not accomplished what we set out to do here.” Executive vice president Alan Smith detailed the gloomy financial picture, telling the group, “From 1980 to 1985, GM spent $45 billion in capital investment, yet increased its worldwide market share by only 1 percentage point, to 22 percent…For the same amount of money, we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright, instantly increasing the market share to 40 percent.”9
Once the direness of the situation was finally recognized, the company's top leadership concluded that we couldn't wait the full three years for another executive conference. So in June of 1988 another one was held, this time at a resort in Traverse City, Michigan, far less luxurious than the Greenbrier but still a pleasant contrast to our everyday environment. There was plenty of outdoor recreation available, but the meeting sessions were so long and intense that few participants had the time or energy for play. This conference, so dramatically different in both format and substance from its predecessors, was shaped by the intersection of two initiatives that had been developing during the time between the Techbrier and Traverse City meetings.
One was the creation of the Group of 18, the executive vice presidents and group executives, who had begun meeting to establish priorities and build a strategic plan for the company's turnaround. The process had begun informally, growing out of a suggestion of mine over the lunch table that we group executives might want to take a look at each other's group business plans and try to see where they interacted and how they might be fitted together. One of my colleagues supported the idea, saying, “Gosh, Marina, you may just be new enough around here and dumb enough not to know that you can't do that, and actually get it done.” Here was my chance, I said to myself, to be a player in bringing about the cultural change GM so desperately needed.
Mike Naylor, who had been preaching the gospel of strategic planning at GM for two decades, became the facilitator for a series of meetings where the group executives began to flesh out an integrated planning process for the company, incorporating a long-range vision, critical priorities, and plans for effective interaction to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. After we had made some progress, we invited Bob Stempel and Alan Smith, both members of the Executive Committee, to lead our efforts, and they accepted.
The second initiative was a program called Leadership Now, a training program for executives designed to change not the structure but the culture of the company, stressing the importance of openness, mutual trust, and empowerment—a combination of sensitivity training and personal empowerment the likes of which GM had never seen before. The need for a program to root out the company's traditional culture had first been voiced by John Stewart, a tall, lean New Englander with a patrician bearing, a brilliant analytical mind, and a no-nonsense manner. One of the McKinsey consulting firm's most senior consultants, he had been trying for years to push GM in the directions it needed to go, including making a clear-eyed assessment of its deteriorating competitive position and drastically streamlining its decision-making processes.
The Leadership Now trainer assigned to work with GM couldn't have been more different from Stewart. Mark Sarkady was a casually dressed, boyish-looking man with an unruly mop of black hair whose excitable manner undoubtedly stemmed from his Hungarian background. Executives who went through his training program, reported one observer, “seemed to have undergone—for the short term, anyway—some sort of religious conversion.”10 Despite their sharply different styles, both men had the same goal—to bring about change at GM dramatic enough to ensure its long-term viability—and neither underestimated the difficulty of the task.
The Traverse City conference was shaped by a combination of the Group of 18's work and the Leadership Now training program. We, the group executives, took the lead in laying out the company's most urgent priorities. I had been arguing for some time that this list should embody a broader vision for GM, extending beyond the vehicles themselves to being a leader as a “total transportation organization,” reviving the slogan that GM had showcased but never implemented twenty years earlier at Transpo ′72. Saturn was already demonstrating the attractions of its unique no-haggle purchasing experience, and anecdotes abounded about why the quality and convenience of post-purchase relationships with the dealer were important to decisions about what car to buy. I also tried to arouse enthusiasm for experimenting with a fleet of city cars that could be rented by the hour and picked up and dropped off at convenient locations around town—another idea that had surfaced at Transpo ′72. But I couldn't drum up support, and “great cars and trucks” remained the embodiment of GM's vision of how to attract and hold customers.
The traditional speeches from top management to a passive audience of executives sitting in straight rows of chairs were replaced with an interactive workshop format in which everybody present was involved in sharing ideas. At the end of the conference, Roger Smith wound things up by proclaiming, “A corporation, like any living thing, must change if it is to survive. You see, we—that's you and I—have the vision to point the way for change. And we—that's you and I—have the courage to change.”11 At that moment Smith, wearing a casual brown sweater rather than his usual suit and tie, appeared more human than he ever had before, and many of those who heard him dared to hope that we were experiencing the birth of a fundamental change in GM's culture.
My own reaction combined hope with caution: “We are all very conscious of the fact that we raised expectations at Traverse City. There was an immediate afterglow and there will be an immediate letdown, because the world is not going to change overnight. But even the letdown will leave us at a higher level than we were before.”12 But Roger Smith's conversion couldn't conquer his domineering style, and the dramatic changes the Group of 18 had hoped to initiate didn't happen. Once again, the GM culture of inertia prevailed over efforts to dislodge it.
When Roger Smith retired as CEO in mid-1990, the world both inside and outside GM breathed a collective sigh of relief. Both GM's reputation and its financial condition were at an all-time low, and Roger was seen as the man responsible. The board's choice as Roger's successor, Robert Stempel, offered many reasons for optimism. An automotive engineer who had risen through the ranks to become GM's president, he had a string of successes under his belt and was widely regarded as a shining example of engineering talent. Stempel broke the long-standing tradition of a finance man as CEO; now the guys who designed and built cars and trucks had one of their own at the top. A huge man with a booming voice, a firm handshake, and an inclusive manner as he took copious notes on what other people said in meetings and conversations, he would have won any companywide popularity contest for the top position.
The man Stempel designated as president, Lloyd Reuss, was another matter. He was also an engineer, but there the resemblance ended. A small, taut, wiry man with an aggressive manner and zero tolerance for bad news or dissenting opinions, Reuss had as many failures behind him in his GM career as Stempel had successes, but he had somehow managed to leave them behind as he was promoted to the next level. The board neither understood nor was comfortable with Stempel's choice, but it acquiesced to his stubborn insistence that Reuss was the man he wanted as president.
Stempel's timing couldn't have been worse. He became GM's chairman and CEO on August 1, 1990; on August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait, creating a climate of uncertainty devastating to car and truck sales. Furthermore, Roger Smith had used creative (though legal) accounting methods to push the bow wave of disaster ahead of him, to ensure that it crashed over the head of his successor rather than his own. The result was that Stempel, a smart, decent man who might have become a successful chief executive in more “normal” times, was overwhelmed. His horror of confrontation and his belief in incremental rather than radical change rendered him unequal to a situation that cried out for both. By early 1992, GM was on the edge of bankruptcy.
Despite the fact that he had been welcomed as a breath of fresh air, Stempel carried with him into the job some of GM's most counterproductive behaviors. In 1990, he maintained the company's aversion to a UAW strike—and the resulting drop in sales and market share—by agreeing to the most generous labor contract ever, just at the time when a reduction in labor costs was key to GM's ability to compete. Beneath Stempel's hail-fellow-well-met exterior lay the institutional arrogance and imperious style characteristic of the company's senior executives. This was brought home to me when both he and I were flying to Europe for a meeting of the European Advisory Council. He was using one of the company planes, configured to seat ten to a dozen people, so I naturally assumed that I would fly with him. Not so; he insisted that I take a commercial flight, business class, presumably so that he and his wife, Pat, would have privacy on the overnight flight.
Lloyd Reuss's executive style exacerbated Stempel's difficulties. As the company's top operating officer, he made some major strategic mistakes. He insisted on the importance of keeping the plants working at capacity even though, under current competitive conditions, it meant building vehicles he knew we would have to sell at prices below the additional cost of making them. He also resisted investment to make GM a leader in fuel efficiency and safety features like air bags because he felt they weren't high on customers' priority lists. His first decision violated one of the most basic tenets of my economist's soul, while his second made me despair of GM ever recapturing its reputation as a forward-looking leader in its industry. But there was no arguing with him on these issues.
Meanwhile, the Group of 18 and many of the midlevel managers were plugging away at streamlining GM and reshaping its traditional culture. That group also took to heart the “black book” compiled by General Counsel Harry Pearce on the basis of more than thirty interviews with GM's top executives (other than the chairman and president) and intended as a set of recommendations for the new chief executive. Because the interviewees were assured of confidentiality, their evaluations of the existing GM organization were devastatingly candid and their proposals for reform sweepingly comprehensive. We were about to present the book to Bob Stempel, with our strong endorsement, when the executive in charge of the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac Group invoked the authority of President Reuss to quash it—yet another example of the old boys' network's protectiveness and resistance to radical change.
After Howard Kehrl retired, Alan Smith became my boss again, and I saw as my major task working with him to implement the initiatives the Group of 18 had championed. Alan was also busy reshaping himself, from a hard-eyed finance man into the guru of the people he had championed at Traverse City. Some of the people who worked with Alan felt that he had indeed undergone a conversion, from a top-down management style to a more collegial and inclusive one. Although I now found his office door open to me once again, I wasn't persuaded.
When Jack McNulty retired as vice president of Public Relations, I began a search both inside and outside the company for a successor who engendered trust, could improve GM's communications, and would contribute to burnishing its tarnished reputation. This was a critical appointment at a time when the public perception of an uncaring, arrogant automaker needed desperately to be replaced with the image—and the reality—of a friendly, open, responsible one.13
With the help of a search firm, I compiled a list, interviewed candidates, and made a recommendation to Alan. But when his response came back, the name on it had not appeared on anyone's list. The chosen successor was Jim Fitzpatrick, a GM lifer who started out in Finance and was a member of long standing in Alan's old boys' network. I was infuriated by this total rejection of an orderly selection process in favor of blatant favoritism, and Jim and I started out on the wrong foot. Our tense relationship eventually burst out into open warfare, with Jim trying to exclude me from meetings he had called and me complaining about his behavior to Alan. Such goings-on were unheard of in a world where hostilities and backbiting were never allowed to break the surface of correct behavior, and both of us found our credibility undermined.
One of the follow-ups to the Leadership Now process had been an evaluation, or feedback report, from each participant's peers and subordinates. Everyone was judged on five criteria: vision, urgency, empowerment, trust, and responsibility. I had found myself from time to time questioning my effectiveness as a general executive, but I was unprepared for the devastating evaluations I received from the four vice presidents who reported to me and the five peers (other group executives) who turned in responses. With one exception—my subordinates scored me high on trust—I scored below the median of the GM executives who had gone through the Leadership Now program and, in some cases, far down in the percentile rankings.
After I recovered from the initial shock, I started to look for reasons why my peers and subordinates rated me so low in leadership qualities, despite my efforts to get people to work together. The most comfortable explanation, of course, would have been to attribute their responses to sexism, their refusal to recognize that a woman could perform well as a high-level executive. Certainly, the GM executive ranks still were basically a male preserve. My male colleagues didn't engage in overt harassment or put-downs, but it was quite clear that they saw me as a sort of “third sex,” regarding me in an entirely different light than their wives and female social acquaintances. It was only when their daughters with MBAs started to bring home tales of their own difficulties in the workplace that they began to understand what it meant to be both a woman and an executive in a male-dominated environment.
The most outrageous example of sexist behavior I learned of at GM surfaced when I enlisted the advice of the company's chief of security on how to deal with the persistent attentions of a man—a highly regarded mathematician and professor I had met briefly when I was in college twenty-five years before—who had been stalking me for several years, in person or by telephone when he had the chance, but most persistently through a constant stream of unanswered letters. The message was unvarying; he proclaimed his passionate love for me and insisted that we should abandon our families and run off together. I was unnerved, and my daughter was downright terrified.
The security chief I asked to come up to my office to give me his view of the situation looked as if he had been sent from central casting. A former FBI operative, he was tall and stolid, with a craggy face that could have been carved out of granite. When I told him my predicament, he asked to see some of the offending letters. I produced them with some embarrassment, commenting that he had probably never dealt with quite such a situation before. Suddenly, a smile appeared on his stern visage. “Well, Dr. Whitman,” he drawled, “I've never dealt with an executive who received such letters. But I've had to handle executives who sent them.”
The more I reviewed my own behavior, though, the more I realized that, even though the GM executive ranks still harbored conscious or unconscious sexism, a lot of the responsibility for my low evaluations rested with me. For one thing, I was a control freak, micromanaging people, looking over their shoulders, and even editing their work, which kept them from feeling empowered to use their best judgment in carrying out their tasks. And I hadn't mastered the art of making people take possession of ideas as their own, too often insisting on the superiority of my own particular way of stating an idea, rather than letting others modify and adapt it.
I had also failed, apparently, in my effort to act on a sage piece of advice from that wise old owl, the McKinsey consultant John Stewart. Given the ambiguity of a group executive's role, John warned me, I needed to seize on some particular issue or goal, make it my own, and become its corporate champion. I thought I had such a goal: to work on breaking down the organizational “silos” that stood in the way of effective communication and integration at GM, and to encourage greater candor and openness both within the company and in our interactions with the outside world. Whether because of the rigidity of the GM culture and the broad scope of my effort or because my personal style got in the way, I didn't manage to elevate that goal and become its successful champion. I could have used more lessons from my mother, an expert in using her charm to get people, men and women alike, to do what she wanted.
Finally, and most devastatingly, I didn't have the guts to follow through on suggestions for cutting costs by eliminating activities and streamlining the organizational structure of the Public Affairs staffs. When I asked for, and received, dozens of suggestions from members of the Public Relations staff along these lines, I responded to too many of them by explaining why the idea wouldn't work, rather than telling them to get to work on implementation. I never pushed the vice presidents of Government Relations and Public Relations hard enough to come up with ideas for combining some or all of their functions under a single vice president. And when the deputy head of Environmental Activities assembled a task force to come up with a plan for parceling out that staff, which was widely regarded as ineffective, to other parts of the company, I vetoed it as too risky.
I realized gradually, but too late, that if there's anything worse than failing to solicit suggestions from subordinates, it's asking for them and then not giving them serious consideration. How much of my clumsy response came from wanting to avoid confrontations with my vice presidents, how much from my own insecurity about giving up large pieces of my turf, and how much from genuine concern about risks to the company's reputation and/or compliance with regulations, I can't sort out. But I had definitely dropped the ball at a time when cost cutting and streamlining were becoming increasingly essential to the company's survival.
It hit me suddenly that many of the mistakes I was discovering in myself—the tendency to micromanage, the failure to look reality full in the face, to hear what people were really telling me, and to implement suggestions I had solicited—reflected the sins that had long afflicted the GM culture. Even as I fought so hard to change that culture, was I being co-opted by it, I asked myself?
My sense of self-worth shrank further as it dawned on me that the position of group executive in the corporate staffs arena offered little if any added value and was increasingly resented by other parts of the company as they struggled to downsize their own ranks. The evidence that the role was superfluous moved front and center when the other group executive who reported to Alan retired and was not replaced, so that his staffs now reported directly to Alan while mine still had me in between. It didn't take any time at all to see which staffs felt better positioned. As I did silent battle with Alan for a leadership role on the dual task of streamlining our staffs and shepherding the process of culture change, I gradually realized that he felt as insecure in his position as I did in mine and was trying just as hard as I was to be seen as a positive force for change. Being higher up in the organization than me, and with a much broader reach, he of course won that battle, but in the end he lost the war, a war that dominated my final months at GM and ended a few weeks after I left the company.
Dissatisfied with the way things were going, the GM Board of Directors, led by John Smale, whose leadership skills I'd grown to admire when he was CEO of Procter and Gamble and I was a member of that board, was conducting its own investigation and making its own decisions. The directors felt that change wasn't occurring nearly fast enough and that Stempel was not giving satisfactory answers to the increasingly tough questions they were putting to him.
The first blow of the ax fell at the April 1992 board meeting. Lloyd Reuss was replaced as president by Jack Smith, vice chairman for international operations, and, when Stempel refused to fire Lloyd outright, he was relegated to a marginal job. Bob O'Connell, the chief financial officer whose accounting talents had kept Roger Smith's ship afloat, was also demoted. Alan Smith kept his job but was forced to give up the seat on the Board of Directors that he had held for eleven years, a devastating signal of dissatisfaction from the outside directors. The final blow came six months later, in October, when under irresistible pressure from a public message of no confidence issued by the board, Bob Stempel resigned as chairman and CEO. Lloyd Reuss, Alan Smith, and Bob O'Connell, along with one or two other holdovers from Roger Smith's era, left the company with him. The senior rank of the old boys' club was gone, clearing the decks for new leadership that would, hopefully, create the kind of company that I, along with like-minded colleagues, had spent my years at GM advocating.
While this top-level drama was unfolding, I tried to push my gnawing loss of self-confidence to the back of my mind as I went about my daily business. I struggled to develop ways of prodding GM on the safety and environmental fronts, teaming up with the group executive for the Technical staffs to develop an integrated approach to these issues. I initiated a dialogue between GM and the Environmental Defense Fund, the first such interaction between an American auto company and an environmental organization.
These initiatives were part of my underlying goal as Public Affairs group executive: to incorporate social considerations into GM's operating decisions. Well before corporate social responsibility (CSR) became a buzzword and its promotion a cottage industry, I was trying to persuade my GM colleagues that the link between a company's social reputation and its business performance had indeed gone global. Another way of putting this to my colleagues and superiors was that the outside world's opinion of GM would change—the “windows in” would reveal a new view—only when what we make and do (our products and our policies) are congruent with what we are and say (our vision of the company and the claims we make for it). But, with Lloyd Reuss and his rose-colored glasses setting the course, my urgent insistence on a tight link among our product programs, capital allocations, business plans, public positions, and communications strategies didn't have a discernible impact.
My ongoing tensions with Alan Smith—I actually hurled the epithet “You turd” at him when he abandoned me in midsentence to answer a summons from the chairman while we were discussing my future at GM—and my increasing sense that I had become ineffective as an individual and redundant as a line on the organization chart, along with the endless discussions of GM's urgent need for reform but total lack of effective action, combined to throw me into a state of depression. I continued to go to work every day, attend meetings, write memos, and move endless piles of paper from the inbox to the outbox, but I was increasingly unable to concentrate or enjoy life. After this had gone on for some time, I was miserable enough to seek professional help. The psychiatrist I consulted, a frail-looking man with a wise expression, a sharply beaked nose, and a benign demeanor, wasn't convinced at first that I was clinically depressed. “You're so well-dressed and never cry in my office,” he averred. But my description of my mind as “constantly whirring around like a squirrel in a cage, with no way of stopping to rest,” persuaded him that I needed his help. The combination of a series of talk sessions and an antidepressant put me back on a more or less even keel and also helped me to recognize that it was high time I got out of GM.
In telling Bob Stempel that I intended to retire, I strongly recommended that he abolish not only my job but the entire group executive layer of management in the staff (as opposed to the line) areas of the organization. Bob's immediate response was to express his confidence in me and urge me to propose a more meaningful job for myself somewhere in the GM organization. I was grateful for his courtesy, but, however hard I tried, I lacked the imagination to design such a position, given my current high level in the organization and my nonautomotive background. Basically, I didn't want to. General Motors had become quicksand into which my sanity was rapidly sinking; only total separation, I felt, could save it.
I didn't look forward with any great enthusiasm to my formal retirement dinner at the Detroit Athletic Club or to the gift traditionally presented there to a retiring GM officer, a huge sterling silver tray engraved with the signatures of all my fellow corporate officers, which was called, in company parlance, a pickle dish. But GM's rigid commitment to long-standing rituals and its tendency to lay elaborate plans and then foul up somewhere in their execution combined to turn this particular evening into a nightmare. Jim Fitzpatrick was slated to retire at about the same time as me, a decision arrived at reluctantly by Alan Smith when he discovered, as I had warned him, that Jim was not trusted by the group executives who headed the operating units. The result was that our retirement dinners were combined—a practical, cost-conscious decision. But the news that I would have a man who had become my nemesis as cohonoree made my spirits sink even further.
Following tradition, the full complement of GM officers was seated along one huge table in strict order of rank and seniority. Our progress through numerous dinner courses was punctuated by speeches praising the retiring honorees and videos that memorialized high points in each of our lives. Jim Fitzpatrick's video was first (because I was the more senior of the two, my recognition was scheduled as the evening's windup) and went off without a hitch. Just as mine started, the video machine broke down and resisted all efforts to repair it. Bob Stempel had to extemporize as best he could, but he was fuzzy on the details, and most of the point was lost. When I finally saw the tape, I was touched by the effort that had gone into it and flattered by the comments of people I'd worked with, in government as well as in GM. But the letdown of the evening itself symbolized my frustration and disenchantment as I left the company I had joined with such high expectations for what I might be able to accomplish in a totally new arena.
Bob Stempel and Lloyd Reuss both forged new careers for themselves after leaving GM. Stempel became CEO of Energy Conversion Devices, a Michigan firm known for pioneering work in the development of non-polluting alternative energy sources to power cars and trucks. Reuss, a committed Christian, became the much-admired volunteer executive dean of the Center for Advanced Technologies at Focus: Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides technical training in a variety of fields for inner-city Detroit youths. But for the company they left under duress there has been no such vibrant second life, but rather a humiliating decline into dependency and dismemberment—a fate not even I, GM's resident Cassandra, could have foreseen. That fate has included bankruptcy, a rescue that put the US government in the driver's seat, the forced departure of two CEOs in the space of a year, the sale or abandonment of four of GM's eight vehicle lines, the replacement of most of the Board of Directors, and a management shakeup that promoted a new generation of executives (including Lloyd Reuss's son, Mark) to top positions. Both the company and the new vehicles it is introducing are today commanding new respect. Perhaps, just perhaps, the GM culture against which I did battle in vain has at last been uprooted.