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
This agreement is another important milestone in the turnaround of General Motors.
This is a game that's going to play as long as you're playing it. It's never going to end. It'll go until I retire, and when the next person has the job, they'll be on it too.
This is a difficult but necessary decision, and it was made only after the greatest deliberation. A number of other U.S. companies have already taken similar action in the face of these rising costs and increasing global competition. In particular, U.S. health-care costs continue to rise at high rates. When these benefits were conceived decades ago, no one could have foreseen the explosive cost inflation that we have been experiencing in recent years. These costs are simply not sustainable.
This has been a difficult period for all of us at GM but I'm confident that by working together we can and will get through this,
This 'hand-in-glove' working relationship between GM Auto and GMAC provides ample benefits to our dealers and our stockholders, and is critical to our ability to compete in the marketplace,
A lot of other things come along with Chapter 11, which basically end up in a lot of pain.
All of our business units except GM North America are on or above track, and that has the extreme attention of us all. Progress is moving in the right direction ... but we still have more work to do.
Don has played a pivotal role in strengthening GM's global manufacturing competitiveness, ... His contributions provide an important foundation for our future as we continue to bring these world-class manufacturing processes to new plants and existing facilities around the world.
Really, a lot of our share loss this year is a strategy to -- and I think it's the right thing to do -- lessen the daily rental fleet,
There's pressures, of course, but I actually feel energized by the challenge.
I've actually been saying I don't think anybody makes any money on hybrids, but that's not an accurate statement. Our bus hybrids can make money sometimes.
If I look at our priority list on the things we need to do to get cost-competitive, wage rates are nowhere near the top for us. We have a far greater burden in legacy costs, in flexibility of using our work force, in jobs banks than we do in wage rates.
I don't see a big panacea reducing the number of brands we have.
I don't think having me do both the jobs, the corporate job and the North American job, is the right long-term answer. But I think while we're in the midst of the turnaround, the value of the shortened lines of communication speaks for itself. And so we're going to stick with it for a while longer.