Quote Of The Day: Meet the New Boss Edition
Published: June 10th, 2009
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“I don’t know anything about cars. A business is a business, and I think I can learn about cars. I’m not that old, and I think the business principles are the same.”
—Incoming GM Chairman Edward Whitacre Jr. admits his lack of auto experience to Bloomberg
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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"How has AT&T done? Haven’t they lost of ton of market share and customer satisfaction gone way down?" AT&T did so badly that one of their former baby bells, Southwestern Bell (SBC), picked up the parent company on the cheap and renamed the whole thing AT&T. Whitacre is the hard driving, engineering trained executive who led SBC's re-assembly of much of the pre-breakup AT&T while focusing the combined company on wireless and high speed internet services. Whitacre bought out the former parent company and turned the thing into a very successful modern company. AT&T wireless is gaining market share at a rapid clip right now, thanks in part to its exclusive deal for the iPhone. AT&T embraces the world standard GSM phone technology while rival Verizon is stuck with a largely USA only CDMA POS.
Sometimes, strange and exceptional situations require strange a exceptional solutions. a chairman sadly is as good as his advisers, so Mr Whitacre being where he is he should be a good judge of character and surround himself with competent people that know a thing or two about cars. i hope. my solution would be to bring Ross Brawn into the equation, now that guy can do miracles just by putting the right people in the right places. leadership takes talent, i think ....
John Horner, Thanks for your posts. Mr. Whitacre I apologize for being uninformed. SBC was an interesting forward looking company to your credit.
Here we go again: [s]big[/s] car company being run by a suit who knows nothing about cars. Gets around in a limo driven by somebody else. Only drives his own products on a closed test track once or twice a year. All the serfs at the test day are too scared to admit the cars on hand are actually hand-built and very different from the crap that reaches the dealers. In the mean time, the bean counters will nickle and dime the engineers, suppliers and dealers to extract the maximum profit from every car. Quality will take a dive and the public will look elsewhere for something that does not fall apart from day one. The above recipe for disaster is a tried and tested one and this non-product oriented non-car guy will probably try it again. Where do you go from Chapter Eleven? It seems that Chapter Seven is not far away...