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
Jerry brings years of business experience and knowledge of the automotive industry to the GM board. We are pleased to welcome him to our Board.
Over the last nine months we have been aggressively implementing our North American turnaround plan.
Our financial performance continues to be quite disappointing,
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,
Overall economic growth in Europe hasn't been robust and the car market hasn't been robust,
I think we'll probably pass Toyota in the U.S. on the workers-per-vehicle metric.
I remember very clearly at the first budget review having a pretty direct conversation with the head of manufacturing... We began to get huge improvements in productivity and responsiveness. I got a chance to see that firsthand.
I think it's going to be silly not to take the competitive threat seriously. If we haven't learned any lessons from Japan and Korea, we deserve the things that befall us, ... On the flip side, the growth in China continues to be so strong that our guess is that most of the capacity in China will be used to meet Chinese needs.
I was incredibly impressed with his (Lutz's) continuing passion and enthusiasm for cars and trucks and the auto industry in general,
I think everybody's reeling a little bit about how fast things have moved south,
That's because a couple products represent a larger percentage of the total at Chrysler than at GM. That can be an advantage and a curse, in terms of sales going up or down based on the results of a couple cars.
Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning.
Our relationship is strong, and we look forward to our continued partnership. This transaction will allow us to preserve our business relationship, while further building up GM's already significant liquidity position during this critical phase of our turnaround.
Stan O'Neal has been a great asset on the GM Board and to General Motors management over his 5 years of service as a director. We are grateful for his many positive contributions to General Motors and wish him the best.