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
Over the last nine months we have been aggressively implementing our North American turnaround plan.
I've given no thought to anything but turning the business around, ... I wasn't brought up to run and hide when things get tough. I'm convinced that's the way that things get righted.
GM's top priority is to restore our North American operations to profitability and positive cash flow as quickly as possible. In 2005, we laid out a comprehensive and integrated strategy to address the structural issues that impede our competitiveness and profitability, and we are focused on rapidly executing all aspects of the turnaround plan.
This is the kind of thing we need to do. I don't have a big scoreboard in my office, depicting which groups had taken cuts. I think you can say the whole family is participating in the effort to turn GM around.
This agreement is another important milestone in the turnaround of General Motors.
Our fate is going to be determined in the next three to five years on getting this business in the U.S. turned around and profitable,
I have given no thought to anything but turning the business around, ... I wasn't brought up to run and hide when things get tough.
That's about what it was in 2004. We're not exactly sure about 2005, but we don't think it will be any different than last year, or what it has been in 2002, 2003 and 2004,
The industry sales mix is shifting away from the larger, higher-profit vehicles, even pickups, ... reflects too much reliance on those products for profitability.
You've got to have a consistent, gradual growth strategy, and I think some basics are going to be required,
The lower prices have given consumers a compelling reason to try our new vehicles, and it's working.
I'm not sure I'm going to make a lot of progress by scorekeeping everybody's sacrifice.
I think we'll probably pass Toyota in the U.S. on the workers-per-vehicle metric.
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.