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 are viewing the U.S. economic and auto market environment with considerable caution, ... That, combined with our poor business results in the first three quarters this year, really highlight that we are at a critical juncture in our company's history. And so we are accelerating the pace and scope of our turnaround actions.
We are very pleased with the market's reaction to our launch products. In the first three months of the year, our new products accounted for about 30 per cent of our total sales ? more than double where we were a couple of years ago.
We have decided to substantially alter the pension benefits for current U.S. salaried employees so that we can provide a competitive and fair benefit but also reduce the financial risks to GM.
There's pressures, of course, but I actually feel energized by the challenge.
There's days you smile and days you frown.
As we sit here today, it's our best guess and well thought out analysis, ... If we've learned anything in the last five years, it's that there's no guarantees in this business or any other business.
As we look at the responsibilities we have to a broad range of constituents, as we look at what we need to do to make the business successful, as we look at our businesses around the world, we think there are significant costs to bankruptcy. We don't think it's a good option.
It's fine if you're making 1,000 or 2,000 of an electric car, and I think there is value in that in a lot of ways, but it's not going to have a big dent in oil consumption in the country, or CO2 emissions.
This is the kind of thing we need to do. I don't have a big scoreboard in my office, depicting which groups had taken cuts. I think you can say the whole family is participating in the effort to turn GM around.
There's been a consistency of approach and a consistency of execution. Moving to a common system and common metrics has really helped us.
Ford, as I understand it, had done away with the concept of regional management, and now they've re-introduced that in Europe, so it's kind of a two-way street.
It's one factor that's important in our overall cost competitiveness. I can't tell you it's the only or the primary thing for us,
It's a big move ... We're confident that this is what it's going to take to get us going,
It was a year in which two significant fundamental weaknesses in our North American operations were fully exposed - our huge legacy cost burden and our inability to adjust structural costs in line with revenue.