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
I want to be clear I'm not saying we expect the government to pick these expenses up. I think they've made it very clear they don't intend to do that, at least the current administration.
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.
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 disagree with Delphi?s approach, but we anticipated that this step might be taken. GM expects Delphi to honor its public commitments to avoid any disruption to GM operations.
We expect to see improved results in 2006 and further progress in 2007.
In his current assignment, Mike has led the team that has helped GM gain back market share in California. He's built strong relationships with dealers and employees in creating marketing initiatives, all of which should prove especially useful as we focus on additional key markets where we need to improve GM's performance.
I'm like Sergeant Schultz, I know nothing. We are trying to share ideas around the world. We don't just come up with a great idea in Brazil and ignore it in the rest of the world.
It's not an easy decision. We don't have many plants that aren't high quality and very productive.
Everybody's got a piece of it. What we're trying to do is look at each piece and say, 'Where are we really uncompetitive versus the people we run against?'... If we're out of line, that's what we need to work on. So, it may not be exactly the same sacrifice everywhere, but I think just about everybody's got a piece of it.
The big and the fast beat the small and the fast. If you check out the NBA today, they're big and fast.
The automotive market in North America remains very competitive, and our results reflect that, ... Improving market share and profitability remain an important priority.
There was an almost an 80% decline one year from 640,000 vehicles to 200,000, and now it's grown back. Our share has grown a lot.
This is a very big step forward that we will build on, ... the single biggest cost reduction that we've probably been able to announce in a single day in the history of G.M.
I'm not sure I'm going to make a lot of progress by scorekeeping everybody's sacrifice.