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
Any time GM and UAW has something going on, we're all curious about how that may affect us,
This agreement is another important milestone in the turnaround of General Motors.
There are some things that I like, like education, wine, and I'd like to be a good cook, although I'm a pretty good eater now.
The fact is that errors were made, and we can't change that. What we have done is disclose our mistakes and work as diligently as we can to fix them.
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.
This really highlights one of the weaknesses of our business model is too much reliance on those products (large SUVs and pickups) for profit and not enough profitability from those other products,
We haven't asked for a bailout but we have asked for a lot of things and the reaction in Washington has been very slow.
We haven't dropped the goal, ... It's obviously tougher right now as we have pension and health-care costs right now, for example.
We no longer take it for granted that we can't be the most productive manufacturer. That's the way it used to be in the 1950s and l960s. We need to get back to that, as one element of a strong position in this excess capacity world that we're going to be in.
We hope it eases up, but I can't obviously tell you've we've seen a lot of evidence of that,
We have to offer products people want to buy, not have to buy,
In order to improve financial results in 2006 and 2007, we are moving quickly to implement several important actions that will address these weaknesses in North America. And we have a good line of sight on the steps we need to take to further reduce structural costs on a global basis that will position GM for long-term success.
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.
In '02 we had another good year in improving productivity in salaried work force. What we're trying to do is make this a regular mind set around here, ... You can't have an ounce of fat these days and meet the pricing and the investments and the profitability targets we're shooting for.