Published CommPro.biz 2014.04.08

GM Too Blind To See

Mary Barra’s “Woman’s Touch” 

may be just what General Motors needs 

Eleven weeks to the day after she stepped into the CEO slot at General Motors, Mary Barra was undergoing a second day of grilling on Capitol Hill. In full attack mode the members of a Senate Committee seemed determined to outdo a House Committee that had at her the day before. Over and over again they demanded an answer to the question that so often dominates these situations, “What did you and your people know and when did you know it?”

Unlike many under that kind of fire, Ms. Barra remained calm and collected; in most cases responding that she wants all the answers to that question more than anyone. So far as how the facts about the sure-to-fail-ignition-switches could be widely known in the company and not to those up in Carpet Land, she pointed to GM’s “Silo Culture” with lousy communications from group to group. We would add that in the late 2000s GM was collapsing into bankruptcy. Nobody wanted to add the “last straw” –another dime to their costs– even an inexpensive fix seemed to loom large.

None of this excuses what happened. But it perhaps explains what kept people in the know from sounding the alarm. Ms. Barra apologized again and again. She promised to get the answers. She promised to compensate the victims, even though under the terms of its bankruptcy GM might not be legally responsible. It would be hard to imagine a more contrite and responsible corporate leader. On the other hand the government bureaucrats who should have set off alarms were throwing up their hands claiming ignorance. Time will tell, but their story seems a lot harder to swallow.

GM had already made some moves in line with Ms. Barra’s declarations to “Do the right thing.” They’ve hired Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg to figure out how to take care of those harmed by GM’s inaction. He administered the September 11^th victims’ funds. BP hired him to sort out the complex financial issues surrounding their Gulf Oil disaster. He is also administering the Boston Marathon funds. Ms. Barra has brought in über attorney Anton Valukas, to head up GM’s internal investigation on how this could have happened. He led the investigation into the Lehman Brothers collapse, the first shoe to fall in the 2008 financial disaster.

So far Mary Barra is on the proper path. We hope she digs out how this tragic series of events occurred. And who ducked when they should have set off alarm bells. There were GM people who knew that innocent people were dying because they were afraid to do the right thing. Ms. Barra needs to find out who failed and who pushed them to put costs first. She needs to clean house. Should she reach that goal, she will set the bar into the rest of this century and beyond for executives in every sector in our economy. May ethics be the wind under her wings.

"Am I wrong?"--"Am I crazy?"

"What do you think?"--"Do you agree?"