Despite the fact that he had been welcomed as a breath of fresh air, Stempel carried with him into the job some of GM's most counterproductive behaviors. In 1990, he maintained the company's aversion to a UAW strike—and the resulting drop in sales and market share—by agreeing to the most generous labor contract ever, just at the time when a reduction in labor costs was key to GM's ability to compete. Beneath Stempel's hail-fellow-well-met exterior lay the institutional arrogance and imperious style characteristic of the company's senior executives. This was brought home to me when both he and I were flying to Europe for a meeting of the European Advisory Council. He was using one of the company planes, configured to seat ten to a dozen people, so I naturally assumed that I would fly with him. Not so; he insisted that I take a commercial flight, business class, presumably so that he and his wife, Pat, would have privacy on the overnight flight.
Lloyd Reuss's executive style exacerbated Stempel's difficulties. As the company's top operating officer, he made some major strategic mistakes. He insisted on the importance of keeping the plants working at capacity even though, under current competitive conditions, it meant building vehicles he knew we would have to sell at prices below the additional cost of making them. He also resisted investment to make GM a leader in fuel efficiency and safety features like air bags because he felt they weren't high on customers' priority lists. His first decision violated one of the most basic tenets of my economist's soul, while his second made me despair of GM ever recapturing its reputation as a forward-looking leader in its industry. But there was no arguing with him on these issues.
Meanwhile, the Group of 18 and many of the midlevel managers were plugging away at streamlining GM and reshaping its traditional culture. That group also took to heart the “black book” compiled by General Counsel Harry Pearce on the basis of more than thirty interviews with GM's top executives (other than the chairman and president) and intended as a set of recommendations for the new chief executive. Because the interviewees were assured of confidentiality, their evaluations of the existing GM organization were devastatingly candid and their proposals for reform sweepingly comprehensive. We were about to present the book to Bob Stempel, with our strong endorsement, when the executive in charge of the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac Group invoked the authority of President Reuss to quash it—yet another example of the old boys' network's protectiveness and resistance to radical change.
After Howard Kehrl retired, Alan Smith became my boss again, and I saw as my major task working with him to implement the initiatives the Group of 18 had championed. Alan was also busy reshaping himself, from a hard-eyed finance man into the guru of the people he had championed at Traverse City. Some of the people who worked with Alan felt that he had indeed undergone a conversion, from a top-down management style to a more collegial and inclusive one. Although I now found his office door open to me once again, I wasn't persuaded.
When Jack McNulty retired as vice president of Public Relations, I began a search both inside and outside the company for a successor who engendered trust, could improve GM's communications, and would contribute to burnishing its tarnished reputation. This was a critical appointment at a time when the public perception of an uncaring, arrogant automaker needed desperately to be replaced with the image—and the reality—of a friendly, open, responsible one.13
With the help of a search firm, I compiled a list, interviewed candidates, and made a recommendation to Alan. But when his response came back, the name on it had not appeared on anyone's list. The chosen successor was Jim Fitzpatrick, a GM lifer who started out in Finance and was a member of long standing in Alan's old boys' network. I was infuriated by this total rejection of an orderly selection process in favor of blatant favoritism, and Jim and I started out on the wrong foot. Our tense relationship eventually burst out into open warfare, with Jim trying to exclude me from meetings he had called and me complaining about his behavior to Alan. Such goings-on were unheard of in a world where hostilities and backbiting were never allowed to break the surface of correct behavior, and both of us found our credibility undermined.
One of the follow-ups to the Leadership Now process had been an evaluation, or feedback report, from each participant's peers and subordinates. Everyone was judged on five criteria: vision, urgency, empowerment, trust, and responsibility. I had found myself from time to time questioning my effectiveness as a general executive, but I was unprepared for the devastating evaluations I received from the four vice presidents who reported to me and the five peers (other group executives) who turned in responses. With one exception—my subordinates scored me high on trust—I scored below the median of the GM executives who had gone through the Leadership Now program and, in some cases, far down in the percentile rankings.
After I recovered from the initial shock, I started to look for reasons why my peers and subordinates rated me so low in leadership qualities, despite my efforts to get people to work together. The most comfortable explanation, of course, would have been to attribute their responses to sexism, their refusal to recognize that a woman could perform well as a high-level executive. Certainly, the GM executive ranks still were basically a male preserve. My male colleagues didn't engage in overt harassment or put-downs, but it was quite clear that they saw me as a sort of “third sex,” regarding me in an entirely different light than their wives and female social acquaintances. It was only when their daughters with MBAs started to bring home tales of their own difficulties in the workplace that they began to understand what it meant to be both a woman and an executive in a male-dominated environment.
The most outrageous example of sexist behavior I learned of at GM surfaced when I enlisted the advice of the company's chief of security on how to deal with the persistent attentions of a man—a highly regarded mathematician and professor I had met briefly when I was in college twenty-five years before—who had been stalking me for several years, in person or by telephone when he had the chance, but most persistently through a constant stream of unanswered letters. The message was unvarying; he proclaimed his passionate love for me and insisted that we should abandon our families and run off together. I was unnerved, and my daughter was downright terrified.
The security chief I asked to come up to my office to give me his view of the situation looked as if he had been sent from central casting. A former FBI operative, he was tall and stolid, with a craggy face that could have been carved out of granite. When I told him my predicament, he asked to see some of the offending letters. I produced them with some embarrassment, commenting that he had probably never dealt with quite such a situation before. Suddenly, a smile appeared on his stern visage. “Well, Dr. Whitman,” he drawled, “I've never dealt with an executive who received such letters. But I've had to handle executives who sent them.”
The more I reviewed my own behavior, though, the more I realized that, even though the GM executive ranks still harbored conscious or unconscious sexism, a lot of the responsibility for my low evaluations rested with me. For one thing, I was a control freak, micromanaging people, looking over their shoulders, and even editing their work, which kept them from feeling empowered to use their best judgment in carrying out their tasks. And I hadn't mastered the art of making people take possession of ideas as their own, too often insisting on the superiority of my own particular way of stating an idea, rather than letting others modify and adapt it.
I had also failed, apparently, in my effort to act on a sage piece of advice from that wise old owl, the McKinsey consultant John Stewart. Given the ambiguity of a group executive's role, John warned me, I needed to seize on some particular issue or goal, make it my own, and become its corporate champion. I thought I had such a goal: to work on breaking down the organizational “silos” that stood in the way of effective communication and integration at GM, and to encourage greater candor and openness both within the company and in our interactions with the outside world. Whether because of the rigidity of the GM culture and the broad scope of my effort or be
cause my personal style got in the way, I didn't manage to elevate that goal and become its successful champion. I could have used more lessons from my mother, an expert in using her charm to get people, men and women alike, to do what she wanted.
Finally, and most devastatingly, I didn't have the guts to follow through on suggestions for cutting costs by eliminating activities and streamlining the organizational structure of the Public Affairs staffs. When I asked for, and received, dozens of suggestions from members of the Public Relations staff along these lines, I responded to too many of them by explaining why the idea wouldn't work, rather than telling them to get to work on implementation. I never pushed the vice presidents of Government Relations and Public Relations hard enough to come up with ideas for combining some or all of their functions under a single vice president. And when the deputy head of Environmental Activities assembled a task force to come up with a plan for parceling out that staff, which was widely regarded as ineffective, to other parts of the company, I vetoed it as too risky.
I realized gradually, but too late, that if there's anything worse than failing to solicit suggestions from subordinates, it's asking for them and then not giving them serious consideration. How much of my clumsy response came from wanting to avoid confrontations with my vice presidents, how much from my own insecurity about giving up large pieces of my turf, and how much from genuine concern about risks to the company's reputation and/or compliance with regulations, I can't sort out. But I had definitely dropped the ball at a time when cost cutting and streamlining were becoming increasingly essential to the company's survival.
It hit me suddenly that many of the mistakes I was discovering in myself—the tendency to micromanage, the failure to look reality full in the face, to hear what people were really telling me, and to implement suggestions I had solicited—reflected the sins that had long afflicted the GM culture. Even as I fought so hard to change that culture, was I being co-opted by it, I asked myself?
My sense of self-worth shrank further as it dawned on me that the position of group executive in the corporate staffs arena offered little if any added value and was increasingly resented by other parts of the company as they struggled to downsize their own ranks. The evidence that the role was superfluous moved front and center when the other group executive who reported to Alan retired and was not replaced, so that his staffs now reported directly to Alan while mine still had me in between. It didn't take any time at all to see which staffs felt better positioned. As I did silent battle with Alan for a leadership role on the dual task of streamlining our staffs and shepherding the process of culture change, I gradually realized that he felt as insecure in his position as I did in mine and was trying just as hard as I was to be seen as a positive force for change. Being higher up in the organization than me, and with a much broader reach, he of course won that battle, but in the end he lost the war, a war that dominated my final months at GM and ended a few weeks after I left the company.
Dissatisfied with the way things were going, the GM Board of Directors, led by John Smale, whose leadership skills I'd grown to admire when he was CEO of Procter and Gamble and I was a member of that board, was conducting its own investigation and making its own decisions. The directors felt that change wasn't occurring nearly fast enough and that Stempel was not giving satisfactory answers to the increasingly tough questions they were putting to him.
The first blow of the ax fell at the April 1992 board meeting. Lloyd Reuss was replaced as president by Jack Smith, vice chairman for international operations, and, when Stempel refused to fire Lloyd outright, he was relegated to a marginal job. Bob O'Connell, the chief financial officer whose accounting talents had kept Roger Smith's ship afloat, was also demoted. Alan Smith kept his job but was forced to give up the seat on the Board of Directors that he had held for eleven years, a devastating signal of dissatisfaction from the outside directors. The final blow came six months later, in October, when under irresistible pressure from a public message of no confidence issued by the board, Bob Stempel resigned as chairman and CEO. Lloyd Reuss, Alan Smith, and Bob O'Connell, along with one or two other holdovers from Roger Smith's era, left the company with him. The senior rank of the old boys' club was gone, clearing the decks for new leadership that would, hopefully, create the kind of company that I, along with like-minded colleagues, had spent my years at GM advocating.
While this top-level drama was unfolding, I tried to push my gnawing loss of self-confidence to the back of my mind as I went about my daily business. I struggled to develop ways of prodding GM on the safety and environmental fronts, teaming up with the group executive for the Technical staffs to develop an integrated approach to these issues. I initiated a dialogue between GM and the Environmental Defense Fund, the first such interaction between an American auto company and an environmental organization.
These initiatives were part of my underlying goal as Public Affairs group executive: to incorporate social considerations into GM's operating decisions. Well before corporate social responsibility (CSR) became a buzzword and its promotion a cottage industry, I was trying to persuade my GM colleagues that the link between a company's social reputation and its business performance had indeed gone global. Another way of putting this to my colleagues and superiors was that the outside world's opinion of GM would change—the “windows in” would reveal a new view—only when what we make and do (our products and our policies) are congruent with what we are and say (our vision of the company and the claims we make for it). But, with Lloyd Reuss and his rose-colored glasses setting the course, my urgent insistence on a tight link among our product programs, capital allocations, business plans, public positions, and communications strategies didn't have a discernible impact.
My ongoing tensions with Alan Smith—I actually hurled the epithet “You turd” at him when he abandoned me in midsentence to answer a summons from the chairman while we were discussing my future at GM—and my increasing sense that I had become ineffective as an individual and redundant as a line on the organization chart, along with the endless discussions of GM's urgent need for reform but total lack of effective action, combined to throw me into a state of depression. I continued to go to work every day, attend meetings, write memos, and move endless piles of paper from the inbox to the outbox, but I was increasingly unable to concentrate or enjoy life. After this had gone on for some time, I was miserable enough to seek professional help. The psychiatrist I consulted, a frail-looking man with a wise expression, a sharply beaked nose, and a benign demeanor, wasn't convinced at first that I was clinically depressed. “You're so well-dressed and never cry in my office,” he averred. But my description of my mind as “constantly whirring around like a squirrel in a cage, with no way of stopping to rest,” persuaded him that I needed his help. The combination of a series of talk sessions and an antidepressant put me back on a more or less even keel and also helped me to recognize that it was high time I got out of GM.
In telling Bob Stempel that I intended to retire, I strongly recommended that he abolish not only my job but the entire group executive layer of management in the staff (as opposed to the line) areas of the organization. Bob's immediate response was to express his confidence in me and urge me to propose a more meaningful job for myself somewhere in the GM organization. I was grateful for his courtesy, but, however hard I tried, I lacked the imagination to design such a position, given my current high level in the organization and my nonautomotive background. Basically, I didn't want to. General Motors had become quicksand into which my sanity was rapidly sinking; only total separation, I felt, could save it.
I didn't look forward with any great enthusiasm to my formal retirement dinner at the Detroit Athletic Club or to the gift traditionally presented there to a retiring GM officer, a huge sterling silver tray engraved with the signatures of all my fellow corporate officers, which was called, in company parlance, a pickle dish. But GM's rigid commitment to long-standing rituals and its tendency to lay elaborate plans and t
hen foul up somewhere in their execution combined to turn this particular evening into a nightmare. Jim Fitzpatrick was slated to retire at about the same time as me, a decision arrived at reluctantly by Alan Smith when he discovered, as I had warned him, that Jim was not trusted by the group executives who headed the operating units. The result was that our retirement dinners were combined—a practical, cost-conscious decision. But the news that I would have a man who had become my nemesis as cohonoree made my spirits sink even further.
Following tradition, the full complement of GM officers was seated along one huge table in strict order of rank and seniority. Our progress through numerous dinner courses was punctuated by speeches praising the retiring honorees and videos that memorialized high points in each of our lives. Jim Fitzpatrick's video was first (because I was the more senior of the two, my recognition was scheduled as the evening's windup) and went off without a hitch. Just as mine started, the video machine broke down and resisted all efforts to repair it. Bob Stempel had to extemporize as best he could, but he was fuzzy on the details, and most of the point was lost. When I finally saw the tape, I was touched by the effort that had gone into it and flattered by the comments of people I'd worked with, in government as well as in GM. But the letdown of the evening itself symbolized my frustration and disenchantment as I left the company I had joined with such high expectations for what I might be able to accomplish in a totally new arena.
Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Page 34