Mary Teresa Barra, an American businesswoman is a CEO and chairman of an American multinational company, General Motors. She became the CEO of the company on 15th January, 2014.
Barra said that you can’t change the culture of a place without changing how you behave. Applying this rule, Barra changed the disrupted culture of the company and mounted the global value of the company.
Mary Barra has been working in General Motors Company since 1980. Her rank kept increasing from co-op student to manager of the Detriot plant, from that to vice president of global manufacturing engineering, product development, and purchasing and supplying, to CEO of General Motors in 2014.
The company was hit by a massive crisis the very year Barra became the CEO of General motors. It was found that the company had been using faulty ignition switches in the production of new cars for years and this caused a great crisis to the company.
When Barra came to know about it, she built a team whose work was to check the overall performance of the company and discuss every day in a meeting.
Barra said in a conference, that their team used to discuss every problem every day and then after that, they figured out the solutions.
“Our motive was to ensure the quality of our vehicles for our customers and we wanted to build the trust of our customers again and ensure them that these problems will never rise again. We wanted to be transparent and real”, said Barra.
“The faulty ignition switches led to the death of 124 people and wounded 275 people approximately. Our motive was to apologize for what has happened because of our company and make sure that this should never happen again”, warned Barra.
Barra gave the unemployment letters to 15 employees. These included eight executives. In 2014, the company looked back on about 30 million cars and $595 million were distributed among the victims.
