Wagoner has become the leader, and lead he must
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BY TOM WALSH
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
November 20, 2008
For better or worse, the fate of Detroit's automobile industry rests heavily on the leadership skills of Rick Wagoner, the chairman and chief executive officer of General Motors Corp.
That's a scary thought to Wagoner's growing band of critics, but he's clearly the ringleader -- if only by default -- of the auto industry's desperate plea for a bridge loan to an uncertain future.
On Thursday, just 90 minutes after leading congressional Democrats blamed Wagoner and his fellow Detroit automotive leaders for failing to make a convincing case for a bailout, Wagoner talked with Free Press writers and editors at GM's headquarters.
He expressed some frustration at the barrage of criticism -- ranging from auto executives' use of corporate jets to Detroit's reliance on big trucks and SUVs -- leveled during U.S. Senate and House hearings this week. He suggested that popular outrage over the nation's $700-billion financial bailout has resulted in a "higher bar" for Detroit's automakers to meet in order justify federal aid.
But he also promised that GM, Ford Motor Co., Chrysler LLC and the United Auto Workers will deliver the facts Congress is demanding.
"We're trying to get a cogent story which addresses everyone's concerns without being so long that people don't have time to listen to it," Wagoner said.
"The executives of the auto companies have not been able to convince the Congress and the American people that this government bailout will be its last," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday.
"Until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money," added House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Wagoner, along with Ford CEO Alan Mulally, Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli and UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, made the industry's plea for $25 billion in bridge loans for the Detroit Three on Capitol Hill this week.
While not officially the leader of the Detroit pack, Wagoner has emerged as both the leading spokesman for the domestic auto industry -- and a lightning rod for its critics.
Wagoner, 55, heads the largest U.S. automaker, General Motors.
He's also the longest-serving of Detroit's automotive top guns, by a mile. Nardelli, who spent most of his career at General Electric and ran Home Depot for six years, was hired in 2007 to run Chrysler. Mulally, after a long career at Boeing, joined Ford in 2006. Wagoner joined GM in 1977 and has been CEO since 2000.
A Harvard MBA and a former basketball player at Duke University, Wagoner is a genial manager respected by his GM colleagues as a hard-working, self-effacing executive. He's been trying to overhaul a huge, bureaucratic, beast of a company for years. And while critics charge that the pace has been too timid, he has also been resilient, surviving repeated predictions of his ouster.
Wagoner conceded in his interview with the Free Press that it's difficult to pull a concise, coherent plan together among four entities -- GM, Ford, Chrysler and the UAW -- that are combatants as much as collaborators.
"We don't have a combined business plan. We have three companies and three separate business plans," Wagoner said. "How we manage that does need to be directed by the chairmen of the relevant committees. But I think the facts are pretty clear. The supply base is highly intertwined, there's a huge amount of overlap in the business among those based here."
Wagoner, and the future of Detroit, will be best served if he doesn't wait on Washington politicians to tell Detroit's supplicants how to proceed.
Anybody who was around during Chrysler's brush with bankruptcy in 1979 and 1980 will tell you that federal loan guarantees then would never have happened without bold, vocal leadership from Lee Iacocca.
Rick Wagoner may not be Lee Iacocca -- he's neither as glib nor as pushy -- but he's the de facto leader of Detroit's ragtag bailout pack, and he needs to step up to the challenge. He must convince his fellow CEOs to hangar the corporate jets and drive to Washington in hybrid cars for their next inquisition. He needs to tell Gettelfinger, whose union gave a lot at the 2007 bargaining table, that it must give a bit more. And he needs to convince the big shots to take haircuts, too, whether or not Mulally feels OK about his pay, as he told the House committee this week.
A month ago, as we exchanged scuttlebutt about the crazy events rocking Detroit, an auto supplier CEO told me this about Wagoner:
"Rick's legacy will be written in the next 60 days."
I expect he's right. |
