On a Clear Day …
Susan Docherty may be the most powerful woman in the automotive industry, but if she can’t win over skeptical consumers, General Motors won’t last another century.
(page 1 of 2)
Don’t go looking for Sue Docherty to show up at a meeting in her black power suit. You won’t find it on a hanger back home or waiting for pick-up at the dry cleaners. It’s gone and forgotten. Well, almost. “It’s left my closet,” GM’s new vice president of vehicle sales, service, and marketing says with a wince.
It fit just fine, and was perfectly in style. Indeed, it was absolutely the appropriate thing to wear on the otherwise fine spring morning when General Motors Corp. ended its 101-year run by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “It was a day I never thought I’d see happen,” says the 46-year-old GM veteran, who recalls June 1, 2009, as “the worst moment in my career. … I’ll never forget where I was, nor what I wore.” And like a widow’s mourning suit, the black ensemble is something Docherty (pronounced DOCK-er-ty) has chosen to put behind her as she moves ahead, now one of the top “change agents” at the “new” General Motors.
When President Obama took to the airwaves on March 31 to announce that he’d rejected a bid for additional financial aid for Detroit’s two failing automakers, GM and Chrysler, he made it clear that they could not expect to continue business as usual at the government’s expense. The White House’s auto task force advised Chrysler to find a new parent before getting the second bailout — Fiat, as it turned out. With GM, the company was sent back to draft a draconian turnaround plan. In the end, that meant abandoning half the automaker’s North American brands, including the once-vaunted Pontiac, as well as the struggling Hummer, Saturn, and Saab divisions.
But the proposed cuts, sanctified by a federal bankruptcy judge in New York, took a more personal toll. About a third of GM’s dealers — roughly 2,000 in all — will either be shuttered or follow Saab and Hummer when they’re sold off (though some may be reinstated via binding arbitration). A score of plants, employing thousands of workers, have — or will be — closed. And where cutbacks traditionally affected hourly workers most severely, the pain of bankruptcy has been unusually indiscriminate of rank. On July 11, the day the company re-emerged as “GM Newco,” new CEO Fritz Henderson reported that a full 35 percent of the company’s senior executives would be fired, retired, or simply encouraged to find new jobs. Henderson himself resigned in early December.
Of course, that wholesale shake-up began even before the president’s glum announcement, when task force chief Steven Rattner dismissed GM Chairman Rick Wagoner. Following the bankruptcy, GM got a whole new board of directors. And myriad top managers have been turning in their keys to the executive washroom ever since, including Opel CEO Carl-Peter Forster, manufacturing boss Gary Cowger, and, in mid-October, marketing chief Mark LaNeve.
It was clear that LaNeve’s days were numbered when, immediately after the bankruptcy, he was stripped of his marketing duties, which were handed to septuagenarian Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. In mid-October, LaNeve’s responsibility for sales was transferred to Docherty, while the marketing duties given to Lutz were transferred to her in early December.
There’s an old adage in Detroit that it’s often better to be lucky than good. And Docherty’s luck was certainly with her when, in late October, the Windsor native was presented with a minor miracle. The preceding two years had required GM to make one glum pronouncement after another, notably on the sales front, but October yielded the first year-over-year improvement at the showroom level in 21 months. That it took so long was surprising, given that GM benefited from the “Cash for Clunkers” program last August. Despite her brief tenure, it would have been easy to bask in the spotlight.
“I can’t take credit,” she insists. “I wasn’t on the job long enough. What’s really needed,” she says, “is a humble appreciation that we have a lot of work to do.”
Docherty also thought it right to offer thanks to the frontline troops: the nearly 4,000 surviving GM dealerships that had to work hard to convince skeptical customers that the automaker would be around to provide sales and service. Docherty asked each of her sales team members to call five dealers to say thanks. “When I went to see her [that] morning,” says one of her staff, “she had already called more than five herself.”
There were more than a few observers who were surprised with Docherty’s appointment. She acknowledges that CEO Henderson had a “pool of talent” to draw from. And there are those who’d expected — even hoped — that GM would reach outside to fill the position in order to bring in “new blood,” in the words of one company consultant. “They talk about doing things a different way, but look at all the old faces. There’s really nobody new on the executive committee,” he says, referring to the eight-member team now making most of the day-to-day decisions that don’t have to be sent up to the GM board.
For her part, Docherty doesn’t deny there are some familiar names at the helm, but she says there’s been a significant amount of movement nonetheless. Already, GM Chairman Ed Whitacre Jr. has shifted several senior executives. “You bring in people from the outside only if you think you need to get fresh thinking,” Docherty contends, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t get fresh thinking from the people already in the company.”
There’s no question Docherty has had a lot of opportunity to broaden her viewpoint. Since joining GM in 1986, she’s lived in four different countries and moved 14 times. Before that, she earned two degrees from the University of Windsor — a bachelor of commerce with a major in marketing, and a bachelor of arts in economics. In 2004, Docherty had a chance to go back to school during a yearlong Sloan fellowship at Stanford University. “It was incredible to step out of this business and hear what was happening in other industries,” she recalls. “It provided a perspective I could learn from and bring back to the company. It was worth every dollar they spent to send me to Palo Alto.”
Did you like what you read? Subscribe to DBusiness »
Comments are moderated for appropriate language.