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Copyright © 2015 by Laura Colby. All rights reserved.
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Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Colby, Laura.
Road to power : how GM's Mary Barra shattered the glass ceiling / Laura Colby.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-97263-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-97266-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-97265-6 (ebk) 1. Barra, Mary. 2. General Motors Corporation. 3. Automobile industry and trade--United States--Biography. 4. Women executives--Biography. 5. Businesswomen--Biography. I. Title.
HD9710.U52B333 2015
338.7'629222092--dc23
[B]
2014047584
For Allegra, and all the other members of the next generation
Just don't go there.”
That was Mary Barra's advice when, in March 2012, she was asked at a meeting of Michigan's women in business organization, Inforum,1 about whether she had experienced discrimination as a female manager during her career. Hard as that is to believe—coming from a rare woman engineer, who started on a factory floor at the age of 18 back in the early 1980s—Barra denied ever being held back by being female. “I never said, ‘that happened to me because I’m a woman.'”
Like many women of her generation, Barra played down gender as her career advanced. And she rose through the ranks of General Motors, a company that caught on early to the idea that women make up not only a large portion of the potential workforce, but also a huge share of potential customers. Encouraging women to become leaders made business sense, executives told me over and over again, because women represent a large proportion of car buyers. GM's moves to include women didn't come in a vacuum, though: They followed a string of U.S. government actions that made the company take notice—including a discrimination lawsuit.
Pushed or not, GM has been more successful than most large companies at cultivating high-ranking women, especially starting with Barra's generation. Though the numbers of women on the board and in management still lag behind men, they are at least twice the average of other large publicly traded companies that make up the Standard & Poor's 500 index. Some 26 percent, or six of the 23 top corporate officers are women, and there's a cadre of female vice presidents behind them. That compares with 8 percent for the S&P 500 index companies.2 There are four women on the company's 12-member board of directors, or 33 percent, versus an average of 18 percent for other S&P 500 companies.
GM, especially in 2014 after it was disclosed to have failed to recall millions of cars that had a potentially deadly defect for more than a decade, has been criticized time and again for its bureaucratic culture, where a focus on process can supersede common sense. Yet in reporting this book, one thing that has struck me is that the same obsession with systems and processes has had a big role in creating a cadre of women, including Barra, who are just now getting to the top.
GM executives began reaching out to women as early as the 1970s, as the women's liberation movement was changing the way workforces operated. The steps accelerated and became more concrete following the company's 1983 settlement of a decade-old employment discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Under the landmark deal, reached while Mary Barra was a college student at what was then the General Motors Institute, GM agreed to set goals for the promotion of women and minorities and to report back to the EEOC on its progress. Managers were asked regularly where the women in their areas were, and were encouraged to seek out female talent.
Throughout her career, Barra had mentors both male and female who tried to make sure she got opportunities to grow and advance. Once she was designated a high-potential employee, she was rotated through different positions in the company, at times well beyond her comfort and skill level. By embracing those new challenges, Barra deepened her knowledge and skills and was able to become a better manager. She in turn helped other women, both informally and formally, including setting up an internal networking group for women at the company in the 1990s.
Barra went through a decades-long grooming process before ascending to the top. One of the most striking things about her career is how close she was to some of the most important inflection points in the company's history. Like an automotive Forrest Gump—but smarter—she was often just below the radar, not yet powerful enough to get noticed by outsiders. Still, she was there, soaking up knowledge, learning lessons from the company's successes and failures, and building a network of mentors and supporters.
Her first job out of college in the 1980s was at a factory that was one of the first North American plants to adopt Japanese manufacturing and management methods—which Barra would be instrumental in applying across the company years later. The experiment failed after its cars had safety issues, in a foreshadowing of a safety crisis Barra would face decades later as the company's chief. In the 1990s, when CEO John Francis “Jack” Smith Jr. tried to bring order and logic to GM's sprawling and bureaucratic culture, Barra was in the executive suite, working as his personal assistant. When the company was sliding toward bankruptcy, Barra was one of the top managers scrambling to invent a recovery plan. Following the government bailout, it was Barra who fought to keep executives' pay from being sliced and who helped build the new management team. As the company revamped its car models postbankruptcy, she was in charge of the effort. It was only after decades of steadily climbing the ranks and proving herself time and again that she finally won a job in the public eye.
Loath as she is to play the gender card, Barra had little choice but to “go there” once she was named chief executive officer of General Motors in December 2013. Hers is the highest position ever held by a woman at a global automaker and, given GM's size and importance to the country's economy, perhaps the most important corporate position ever held by a woman in the United States. Much was made of her gender in the news reports of her appointment. Media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, which put her on its cover, wrote profiles. When attending the Detroit Auto Show in January 2014, just as she was taking on her new role, she was mobbed like a rock star.
Amid all the celebration, there was an undertone of condescension toward this woman with an electrical engineering degree, an MBA from Stanford, and more than 30 years of increasingly responsible positions at GM. Even the man who promoted Barra, her predecessor Dan Akerson, said that seeing her take the CEO role was “almost like watching your daughter graduate from college.” Barra's pay was found to be less than Akerson's, until deferred compensation and stock were taken into account.
Little did she know then that within weeks that aura would be tarnished and she would face the greatest challenge of her career. The company had delayed for more than a decade recalling cars for a safety defect that has cost at least 45 customers their lives, a tragedy whose full scope is still being determined. GM—and Barra—were vilified in the Congress that had approved bailing out the bankrupt company only a few years earlier. There, too, gender became an issue. Some pundits even posited that Barra had been given the CEO role by Akerson only because she was female. They argued that she would present the company with a softer image and one that critics were less likely to attack.
Anyone who watched her interrogation in front of the House of Representatives and Senate panels investigating the ignition switch recall—where, ironically, many of the most hostile questioners were women—would reject the argument that she got a pass because she is female. “I am very disappointed, really, as a woman to woman,” scolded Senator Barbara Boxer when Barra was unable to answer detailed questions about the recall during the first round of appearances in April.
There was also some friendly fire. In a national televised interview on NBC's Today show, Matt Lauer asked Barra whether she thought she could be both a “good mom” and CEO of the largest U.S. automaker,3 a line of questioning that immediately drew criticism for its perceived sexism.4 While Lauer responded that he would ask a male CEO a similar question, he gave no examples of having done so.
Of those who know Barra, who have followed her career, and who are familiar with the challenges facing the auto industry, rare is the person who argues that she is unqualified to lead GM. Most would say she got the job despite being a woman, rather than because of it. She has proved herself over decades, starting when she joined Pontiac as an 18-year-old cooperative education student. Along the way, she expanded her skills, made some smart decisions, formed key alliances, proved her intelligence, and did a lot of hard work.
In reporting this book, I learned that Barra, while exceptional, is not an outlier.
She is one of a cadre of women rising through the famously bureaucratic corridors of power at GM and who are just coming into their own. Many of them are engineers who were fearless about following their interests into areas where women were far fewer than they are today, while others are working in finance, marketing, and general management areas. Still, even with corporate programs that seek them out and aim to advance them, women remain underrepresented across the auto industry, including at GM.
This book aims to illuminate the steps Barra took in her career and, in so doing, to provide ideas for others to follow, whether they are aspiring engineers or accountants, parents of girls, teachers, or human resources executives at companies that want to stop shortchanging half of the population—and half their potential customers.
Barra attributes her own career to a love of math and science and a willingness to follow that interest. While women earn more than half of bachelor's and master's degrees in the United States today, they represent a far lower share of those earning degrees in so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The numbers drop even further after college: Though women earn about 20 percent of degrees in engineering, they represent only about 11 percent of those employed as engineers, and many drop out after a few years.5 So recruitment, training, and support throughout a woman's career are just as important as education.
This book is being written less than a year into Barra's tenure in the top job, so the jury is still out as to whether she will be able to effect a lasting change in the way the 100-year-old company does business. Others have tried before, and failed. Barra aims to make GM nimble enough to compete in a challenging global market where the technology is changing drastically, and, as she put it, stop making “crappy cars.” Her competitors aren't standing still, though. Her biggest task is to get beyond the taint of scandal surrounding GM's failure to recall the faulty ignition switch that has branded her tenure. Even as she tried to turn the page at the end of her first year, the company continued to unearth new defects that resulted in recalls.
Time may be on her side. At age 53 (she was born in December 1961), Barra could have a decade or more ahead of her as CEO. And just maybe, by the time she hands the baton over to a successor, we will be so used to seeing women in powerful corporate roles that she will be judged not on her gender, but on the results she obtains. And because Barra and a generation of women like her have dared to enter what was a man's world and pave the way for future generations, her successor could even be another woman. Maybe then we finally wouldn't have to “go there” anymore.
This book would not have been possible without the help of my Bloomberg News colleagues. First and foremost I'd like to thank Matt Winkler, for his backing of the idea and our coverage of women in business generally. A big thank you to Lisa Kassenaar, who heads Bloomberg's global women's project and who first suggested writing about Mary Barra. Lisa was a tireless advocate for the book from the beginning. I'm grateful to Reto Gregori and Jonathan Kaufman for allowing me to take the time to complete it. I'd especially like to thank John Lippert for sharing his vast knowledge of the auto industry and the people who run it, and for his insightful comments on the manuscript.
Other colleagues provided much-appreciated advice and encouragement, including Jason Kelly, Yalman Onaran, Phil Revzin, Angela Greiling Keane, Caroline Chen and Alan Crawford. I'd also like to thank my colleagues in Bloomberg's Detroit bureau, especially Jeff Green, Jamie Butters and Tim Higgins, whose superb work covering Barra and the ignition switch scandal I drew on. A shoutout also to Patrick Hayes and David White of Kettering University, Paige Plant of Detroit's National Automotive History Collection and Janet Driscoll at the Stanford graduate school of business library for their valuable guidance.
I'd also like to express my appreciation for all the current and former colleagues, teachers and classmates of Mary Barra—too numerous to name here—who were generous with their time and insight. I especially want to thank Tony Cervone, for understanding what the project was about, and Juli Huston-Rough, for helping to make things happen. And thank you to Mary Barra, for agreeing to speak with me.
Especially warm thanks to Naftali Raz for his unwavering support, logistical and otherwise.