Rick Wagoner
Rick Wagoner
George Richard "Rick" Wagoner, Jr.is an American businessman and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors. Wagoner resigned as Chairman and CEO at General Motors on March 29, 2009, at the request of the White House. The latter part of Wagoner's tenure as CEO of General Motors found him under heavy criticism as the market valuation of GM went down by more than 90% and the company lost more than $82 billion USD. This led to his being...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth9 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
To make this happen, we need to bring down costs and build the necessary infrastructure -- and the best way to do that is by business and government working together.
We already have made some significant moves to improve our competitiveness in the long term. We need to do more - and we will.
The recent discovery of prior-year accounting errors has been extremely disappointing and embarrassing to all of us. Credibility is paramount, for GM as a company and for me personally.
We had a good hand and I think we overplayed it, ... We're not alone in that, by the way, and others are still playing that hand as they surpass us now in incentive programs.
I have given no thought to anything but turning the business around, ... I wasn't brought up to run and hide when things get tough.
One of our biggest challenges is our lack of cost-competitiveness in the United States, which is due to our legacy costs, especially the ever-increasing burden of high health-care expenses, ... Addressing this challenge in a fair and equitable way requires close work with our union partners, in addition to our ongoing work with government and health-care providers. Gary is the ideal person to do this.
On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with Administration officials. In the course of that meeting, they requested that I 'step aside' as CEO of GM, and so I have.
The fact is that errors were made, and we can't change that. What we have done is disclose our mistakes and work as diligently as we can to fix them.
This really highlights one of the weaknesses of our business model is too much reliance on those products (large SUVs and pickups) for profit and not enough profitability from those other products,
There are some things that I like, like education, wine, and I'd like to be a good cook, although I'm a pretty good eater now.
I was incredibly impressed with his (Lutz's) continuing passion and enthusiasm for cars and trucks and the auto industry in general,
I think everybody's reeling a little bit about how fast things have moved south,
Our relationship is strong, and we look forward to our continued partnership. This transaction will allow us to preserve our business relationship, while further building up GM's already significant liquidity position during this critical phase of our turnaround.
Stan O'Neal has been a great asset on the GM Board and to General Motors management over his 5 years of service as a director. We are grateful for his many positive contributions to General Motors and wish him the best.