Road to Power

Chapter 4 Chevy Blazer: Groundbreaking Laws

Can you ever see the day,” asked Bob Stempel, “when a woman could become the CEO of General Motors?”

Stempel would later become the carmaker's CEO himself, but on the day in the late 1980s when he posed the question, he was a corporate vice president. The person being questioned was J. Michael Losh, a top manufacturing and finance executive who had been in charge of the Pontiac Motor division while Mary Barra worked at the Fiero plant. He recalls that the Detroit meeting was also attended by John Francis “Jack” Smith Jr., who would later succeed Stempel as CEO and who gave Barra one of her biggest career breaks when he hired her as his executive assistant.

The meeting was Losh's annual “progression and succession review,” where he would brief his superiors on how his business was doing, and talk about the career development of the people who worked for him. Losh didn't know Barra while she worked at the Fiero plant—she was quite a few rungs below him—and by the time of this meeting she had already headed to California for her MBA. But Losh remembers well the pressure from his bosses to look for talented women like her and to help their careers advance. So do numerous other GM managers, going back at least to the 1970s.

Even in the late 1980s, very few women had made it into the executive suite. Those who did had mixed experiences. Marina von Neumann Whitman, whose father, John von Neumann, was a mathematician and scientist who helped ...