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
The decisions we are announcing today were very difficult to reach because of their impact on our employees and the communities where we live and work. But these actions are necessary for G.M. to get its costs in line with our major global competitors.
The fact is that errors were made, and we can't change that. What we have done is disclose our mistakes and work as diligently as we can to fix them.
We haven't asked for a bailout but we have asked for a lot of things and the reaction in Washington has been very slow.
We haven't dropped the goal, ... It's obviously tougher right now as we have pension and health-care costs right now, for example.
With the ongoing globalization of GM's product development organization, and the implementation of our global architecture strategy, Bob felt he needed to devote his efforts to product development full time, and I agreed, ... Bob's legacy at GM will be in our future cars and trucks. It makes sense for him to devote his full energies to that critical task.
There are some things that I like, like education, wine, and I'd like to be a good cook, although I'm a pretty good eater now.
We would welcome a more proactive role from elected officials at the national and state levels in broad-based strategies to address the U.S. health care crisis.
We expect to see improved results in 2006 and further progress in 2007.
We've got to move more quickly in addressing these challenging, chronic structural-cost issues,
We no longer take it for granted that we can't be the most productive manufacturer. That's the way it used to be in the 1950s and l960s. We need to get back to that, as one element of a strong position in this excess capacity world that we're going to be in.
We're going to take some time here, think in terms of 30 to 60 days, to step back and decide the next step in this journey, ... There's interest among others for various forms of transactions. So we'll have options. We just haven't decided yet what makes the most sense for GM. In 30 to 60 days we'll be ready to try again with something that we expect will work this time.
We've been able to use NAFTA. We import a lot more products to fill niches. We don't have to assemble them locally. We've consolidated a lot around pickup trucks. Rather than build everything to sell in Mexico, you can ship finished products back and forth. You get the production efficiencies of scale.