Chapter 10 The Volt: Shocked into Action
“How are you doing?” Mark Reuss asked.
“How are you doing?” Mary Barra responded.
“Are you staying?”
“I'm not leaving. Are you staying?”
The executive garage deep underneath the Renaissance Center felt like a bunker in the early days of bankruptcy. Scores of top company officials were quitting, retiring, or being fired. “Neither one of us had a lot of people to talk to anymore,” says Reuss, who had returned from a yearlong stint running GM's Australian unit just as the bankruptcy struck. Like Barra, he is a second-generation GM employee with deep loyalty to the company, but with a vastly different background from hers: Reuss is General Motors royalty, the son of former president Lloyd Reuss, whereas Barra is the daughter of a line worker.
“We made a pact,” says Reuss. They promised that if either one was going to leave GM he or she would tell the other first.
Quite a few high-level GMers who had supported Barra in her career were gone. Gary Cowger, Barra's longtime boss and mentor, stepped down as vice president of global manufacturing and labor relations and took early retirement at age 63. Barra's friend and longtime booster in human resources, Cheri Alexander, had retired in 2008, prior to the bankruptcy, to teach at the University of Michigan. Maureen Kempston Darkes, one of the highest-ranking women at the company, who at the time headed the company's operations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, ended her decades-long career ...
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