With Ed Whitacre essentially choosing himself to serve as the new CEO at General Motors, pundits and columnists are beginning to share their opinions on the man who publicly admitted that he didn’t know anything about cars. At this point in GM’s history, we’re not sure that’s a problem. Does the guy running the second largest car company in the world need to be a gearhead or just a busniess manager?
David Olive, the business columnist for TheStar.com, presents a pretty even handed look at Whitacre and what he represents to the future of GM. While it is true that the guy doesn’t know a spark plug from a steering wheel, we’d argue that GM has people in product management and development roles that are handling that end of the business very well. The new products from GM have been steadily improving with each model year. What the company seemed to be lacking was strong leadership at the top. The last few executive leaders of the company may have been into cars, but they did not prevent the company from nearly slipping under the waves.
Alan Mulally at Ford has been doing a great job steering the company through troubled waters and although they are not out of the woods by a long shot, their outlook and progress is more rosy than either GM’s or Chrysler’s (whose defacto leader is based in Italy). Mulally’s make-up is much more similar in background and history to the traditional leaders of Japanese car companies than American ones. Japanese car companies are historically led by people whose background is in engineernig. The American model, that GM continues to follow, is to have people at the helm with a background in finance and business. Whitacre is going to show us if there is more than one way to skin a cat with his work at GM.
Can a plain spoken, non-gearheaded, 67 year old man, make the stack of tough and potentially messy decisions to bring GM to profitability again? Time will tell.
Source — TheStar.com — Olive: GM’s latest saviour not one of the ‘car guys’
