Road to Power

Chapter 6 Buick Skylark: A View from the Top

One morning in 1997, Mary Barra got an odd telephone message—the chief executive officer of General Motors, Jack Smith, wanted to interview her for a position as his assistant.

“I thought it was a joke,” recalls Barra. She didn't reply to the message, and left the light blinking on her answering machine. Later in the day, she called her boss, Ken Varisco, over and played it for him. Come on, she asked him, who is trying to trick me?

He looked sheepish and apologized. “I didn't get a chance to talk to you about this yet,” he said. “You'd better return that call.”

Barra had returned to GM from Stanford to a job that was less than her dream role, as a senior staff engineer in operations services for what was then the Chevy-Pontiac-Canada group. Essentially, it was another facilities management job, not too far removed from the post she'd held at the Fiero plant.

She let her boss know that she wanted something that would involve working more with the cars themselves rather than plant facilities. “It was great that I had a frank conversation with my manager,” she recalls, “but I didn't get what I wanted right away.” And, she adds, “You've still got to do a good job at the job you have.”

Barra spent almost three years in the maintenance role before she came to Varisco's attention. Then the director of manufacturing staff, Varisco had attended a meeting where Barra gave a presentation at GM's tech center in Warren, Michigan, about 15 miles ...