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'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.
We've been able to use NAFTA. We import a lot more products to fill niches. We don't have to assemble them locally. We've consolidated a lot around pickup trucks. Rather than build everything to sell in Mexico, you can ship finished products back and forth. You get the production efficiencies of scale.
We would welcome a more proactive role from elected officials at the national and state levels in broad-based strategies to address the U.S. health care crisis.
We're pleased to see the significant progress in our first quarter results and in the implementation of all four elements of our North American turnaround plan.
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.
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.
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,
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.