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
We've got to move more quickly in addressing these challenging, chronic structural-cost issues,
History shows you don't know what the future brings.
We've been able to use NAFTA. We import a lot more products to fill niches. We don't have to assemble them locally. We've consolidated a lot around pickup trucks. Rather than build everything to sell in Mexico, you can ship finished products back and forth. You get the production efficiencies of scale.
We're going to take some time here, think in terms of 30 to 60 days, to step back and decide the next step in this journey, ... There's interest among others for various forms of transactions. So we'll have options. We just haven't decided yet what makes the most sense for GM. In 30 to 60 days we'll be ready to try again with something that we expect will work this time.
We would welcome a more proactive role from elected officials at the national and state levels in broad-based strategies to address the U.S. health care crisis.
With the ongoing globalization of GM's product development organization, and the implementation of our global architecture strategy, Bob felt he needed to devote his efforts to product development full time, and I agreed, ... Bob's legacy at GM will be in our future cars and trucks. It makes sense for him to devote his full energies to that critical task.
We're pleased to see the significant progress in our first quarter results and in the implementation of all four elements of our North American turnaround plan.
We hope it eases up, but I can't obviously tell you've we've seen a lot of evidence of that,
We are disappointed with our own sales and market share results so far this year,
When you're buying a car it's a very different thing. It's a massive financial commitment. You expect to own it for a long time, and (bankruptcy) is something that's going to have an impact in the consumer's mind.
We have to offer products people want to buy, not have to buy,
Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning.
Whoever is ahead in this area can get a big advantage versus the other guys. Just being big isn't enough. We really want to pick up the pace in everything we do in the company.
You can buy another product; this is a free country. But if you do, you're paying more than you need to.