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
Rick Wagoner quotes about
The good news is, we know what we need to do to be successful in the business. What we need to do is get products that people are excited about and price them the right way, supported by the right kind of cost structure, and I think in that sense it's moving pretty good.
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.
We don't always agree on stuff, but when it's time to blow the whistle and start the game, we're not still debating.
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.
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.
These bold initiatives are designed to immediately improve our competitiveness and position GM for long-term success and today's transition is a further step in that direction.
These results reinforce the need to step up our efforts to eliminate waste and lower costs, ... The industry continues to venture into new territory -- near-record demand mixed with unprecedented price pressures and intensely strong competition on all fronts.
These negotiations were done in a positive, cooperative, problem-solving spirit, ... While it may have taken some time to reach this cooperative solution, I think it was time well-spent.
These markets are going to grow. They're going to have their ups and downs, just like the American market. But Asia will be the fastest growing area of 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,
Don't worry about planning every step of your life.
These actions are necessary for GM to get its costs in line with our major global competitors,