Road to Power

Chapter 13 Cadillac Escalade: Climbing Back

Detroit's Eastern Market is in a gritty part of town where farmers sell stalks of brussels sprouts to urban families and to the bearded hipsters who are slowly bringing life to the formerly bankrupt city. Though only about a mile from General Motors Company's buttoned-down headquarters, it could be on a different planet. Colorful graffiti-covered warehouses alternate with rows of early 1900s brick buildings, where cafés and restaurants sprout like flowering weeds. The area takes its name from the largest open-air market in the country, created in 1891.

The symbolism of the place–history and renewal–isn't lost on Barra. She chose Eastern Market—instead of the chandeliered ballrooms of company confabulations past—as the locale for a meeting of her top 300 global executives in September 2014. The cream of GM gathered in a rehabbed warehouse on Russell Street, not far from the Hamtramck assembly plant that Barra once ran. The message she wanted to drive home was as unadorned as the surroundings: Either get with the program or get out.

Most of the meeting was spent discussing how managers behave, and how they need to change. Barra dislikes talking about corporate culture, because culture is an amorphous concept that develops over the course of many years—and can take that long to change. Previous CEOs of General Motors, dating back at least to Roger Smith in the 1980s, have promised that they would change the company's culture—with little ...