Mary T Barra, 51, was named Chief Executive Officer on Tuesday at General Motors, the nation’s largest automotive manufacturer and #7 on the Fortune 500 list, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Mary T Barra (Photo: Zennie Abraham via Flickr)
She’s an engineer by training, who started out as a co-op student in GM’s Pontiac Motor division before getting her MBA at Stanford University from a GM-sponsored fellowship. Having lived in the car culture all her life (her father was a die maker in the auto industry), she became the first woman to be named CEO not only in GM’s century-old history but to any major auto maker, the New York Times wrote.
She had been senior vice president of global product development since February 2011 and is credited with spearheading several design changes to GM’s products, including the Corvette and certain Cadillac and SUV models. She is also reported to have launched a program where engineers would spend time in car dealerships, listening to the kinds of things consumers told salespeople they wanted to see in vehicles.
Although her training is in engineering, she has also become known as an executive who keeps costs under control and cuts unnecessary red tape. For example, when she worked in human resources at GM, she got rid of a 10-page dress code and changed the management structure so that only one executive, instead of three, was overseeing the production on each vehicle line, the New York Times Dealbook reported.
