You know, behaviors and visions and values can be posters on a wall. In good times, everybody's like, 'Yeah, but are you going to live them and demonstrate them when you're in a crisis?' And I take that very seriously. And that means we've got to work together and sometimes set aside differences and find our common ground.
There are few industries more synonymous with American business and culture than the automotive industry. For well over a hundred years, Detroit automakers have propelled Americans forward, shrinking the distances between places and enabling all manner of new opportunities. Automobiles became the symbol of mobility and the American dream. America's auto manufacturers have overcome challenges over the years to reclaim a place at the center of the global auto industry. General Motors CEO Mary Barra has spent decades observing these changes and championing strategies to maintain American competitiveness, innovation, and leadership. Her story exemplifies America's national strength, its people. For only in America. My conversation with Mary Barra.
Hey. Hi, Mary. How are you?
I'm well, thank you. Great to see you.
Of course. Thanks for having me.
It's a little quiet today. We had an all-people meeting yesterday, so it's packed to the brim.
Right. So, is this mostly design and that little thing or?
Software. All software, I guess. Yes.
We're virtually outgrowing this office.
Is that right? Yeah. So, right. That's great.
So, this is the Corvette Grand Sport.
0 to 60 in under 3 seconds.
Yeah. Well, it's absolutely beautiful.
Yeah. I'm excited to drive it, too.
It's really iconic. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'll bet it's fun to drive.
It also is absolutely iconic in American history. I mean, it was sort of the sports car. My uncle was a huge car fan, but he owned a couple of these.
That's something that kind of is true to the history of Corvette.
Yeah. And at a time when you had a really growing aspirational middle class.
That's one of the things that we're talking about is the degree to which that was really an aspirational period. You know, everybody owned a house, everybody had their new car. It was—
When they got the Cadillac, everyone knew they made it, you know.
That's right. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. That's right. Are we ready?
You're absolutely ready. Anytime you guys like.
Sounds good. All right.
Mary, it's so great to be with you. Thank you so much for having us here at this wonderful GM facility.
Great to have you here and welcome you to the facility. This is such an important place for General Motors because it's where really the heart of our software work is done.
That's fantastic. I mean, here we are in Silicon Valley. But of course, you were born in Detroit.
And if any city is synonymous with manufacturing and cars, it's Detroit. Motor City. So, talk a little bit about that experience growing up in Detroit. And I know also your father worked for GM. So, talk a little bit about that.
Well, you know, both my parents came to the Detroit area for work. One was in upper Minnesota, one was in the upper part of Michigan. And so, you know, it really was the heart of where the auto industry was really growing. So, there was a lot of opportunity. You know, my parents both believed in the American dream and so they came to find work to make a life and make their life better. So, and then, you know, Detroit is—what I say about Detroit is it's got a lot of grit. We love our sports. We work hard. Like a lot of cities across the country, we've gone through trouble and had struggles, but you know, the state, business, and the city came together, and I really think it's a model. And you know, the city just gets better every year with people coming and the experience that you can have there.
Yeah. Well, in fact, I want to talk more about the Detroit miracle in a little bit, but go back a little bit to you're a little kid in Detroit and what is life like? It sounds almost like kind of middle America, Norman Rockwell kind of.
Well, it kind of is. You know, we were in the suburbs of Detroit and you know, it was one of those situations—my mom was a part-time bookkeeper, my dad was a die maker for General Motors, and you know, we lived on a street where it was after dinner you went out and played till the street lights come on and you just—a very close-knit community and you know, you had a lot of friends and it was kind of just that opportunity that we had because of the good paying jobs to live a great life and continue to grow as individuals. And then my mother was a big believer in education. She didn't have the opportunity to go to college, but she believed in the American dream and she believed if you worked hard, you could do or be anything. And that's the way my brother and I were raised. So, a very loving home and a great community around us.
And so, college was always going to be on the agenda. That was the way it was for me. I always said my parents and I visited college campuses like other people visited national parks. They just wanted me to see what college—they were college educated but they wanted me to see college and so many parents had that aspiration for their children. It sounds like your family was very oriented toward education and doing well that way.
Right. I mean, you know, I think today education is still such an important part of helping people have choice in what they want to do in their life and that's what my mother believed. And she actually came from a very large family and she was known as for me the mom or the aunt who, you know, was always like, 'Where are you going to college? What are you going to study?' And she just believed it was a way to continue to grow and advance.
Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit more about that transition from the Detroit and the GM that you knew as a child where your father was an employee. You said by the way he was a skilled trade. Right. So a lot of talk these days about the importance of the skilled trades. So how did he get trained and how are you doing it today? Because this is really an important transition now for the United States.
I think it's critically important and you know he joined General Motors and then General Motors, you know, now many many years ago, trained him to be a die maker. So you know he was an apprentice and then became a journeyman and then a die maker and it was all on the job training and classes that he took at General Motors, you know, kind of a program that they had and we do the same thing today. I mean, I think now more than ever, we're seeing we need more electricians and pipe fitters and dealer technicians. And so, we have some interesting programs for electricians. Somebody who is working in the plant and working on an assembly line or in a production operation can nominate themselves to go into our apprentice program from an electrician perspective. And, you know, we invest—that's a multi-year program that we invest. But it really is something we think is very important. I think over the last five years we've invested over $250 million in training people as they go in through the apprentice programs for dealer technicians. We actually in many cases we work with the military. So as somebody has completed their service to our country they can then go into a training program to become a dealer technician and there's a shortage in the country of that as well. So I think as we go through this AI transition, revolution, transformation, whatever you want to call it, the importance of skilled trades and people that actually are, you know, doing things, making things is going to become even more important.
Right? It's interesting. So a company large enough as GM to do it itself but one of the challenges is that many companies are either too small or not capable of doing it. And there are some experiments out there with using community colleges and using others. You talked about the military. That's a great source of talent. So are you involved at all do you think? I know you work very often with business councils and talk about how people are viewing that responsibility because we're in a place where the government's not going to be able to do most of it. In fact, I think corporations are going to have to step up to that plate.
Well, absolutely. And Business Roundtable is very much—there's a committee on workforce development and education and you know they also are trying to champion the fact that yes four-year degrees are important from institutions across the country and across the globe but also there's this other path that's a complementary path of, you know, some people want to do different type of work, some people don't want to be in an office or behind a computer, they want to be working with their hands, working outside. And I think those are paths that we have to continue to grow. You mentioned community colleges. We absolutely work with our local community colleges. When we made the transition—when I started at General Motors, the automation was actually hardwire and mechanical switches. And just as I was starting, we were using computers to control all the automation and equipment in the plant. And we partnered with local community colleges around the country to train our existing electricians for that transition to computers. And so I feel like we already have that model. And community colleges can play a very important role.
Speaking of working with your hands, you decided when you went to work for GM you worked in a plant.
So not at a desk. Talk a little bit about that decision. What was that like? What did it teach you that made it as important as you moved into leadership roles?
Well, one of the great things about the program when I started at General Motors, I was a college co-op student. So I got to rotate in engineering, in purchasing, and also in manufacturing. And I liked the energy of being on the assembly line floor where the car comes together and learning how it happens. It's like an orchestra and really understanding and respecting the people who come in and do that every day. They're incredibly talented and I think it was a bit of paying homage to my father who was a die maker. So he worked in a stamping plant where he was actually making the dies to shape the sheet metal to make the vehicle. And so I just loved the energy of being there and that's really—General Motors, we're not a company if we don't make things and make cars. And so understanding that at a detailed level was critical.
Really important. This little girl grows up in Detroit, very much a part of the GM family. You go to work for GM, but at some point you also went to graduate school at a certain graduate school that we know well.
So what was that experience like at GSB? What did you—I often wondered, you know, when people come out of industry and go into graduate school or in particular business school, what translates?
Well, it was—so again, being at General Motors they had a program called the fellowship program where you could apply and they would send a group of students every year to some of the top universities. And so I applied to Stanford and actually got waitlisted but then I did get in. But once I got to Stanford because I grew up in the Detroit area—I mean yes I had traveled and my parents did go see all the national parks. I never went to Disney World, but I saw the national parks—but it was really the first time I was living outside of, you know, the Midwest and the city that I knew well. And you know what I learned going to the GSB was I didn't know what I didn't know. And so it was really transformational for me to take some of the fundamental business classes because I had an engineering degree and then to also really start to see how it all came together to really make a company work and how business works. So it was really transformational for me. I never looked at our company the same way after and I think I had so much more context. And then ever since I went to Stanford I continued to come back and what I quickly learned especially as I got into this role—because like twice I took my whole leadership team to the valley because we knew our industry was transforming—and you know what I saw when I was here and then continued to see is, you know, there's a dedication to yes we can solve hard problems and we can innovate and use technology to make the world better. So that was the takeaways and you know Stanford really was I think foundational for me being in the role I am today.
Yeah. Talk more about innovation because that is one of the things that really kind of has been a hallmark now of your leadership of GM. And so I want to break it into several parts. We are an incredibly ever-changing, always innovating culture. And I've often wondered when you think about innovation and you think about all of the people around you who also think about innovation, what makes it work?
Innovation is rich in General Motors history. I mean if you go back a hundred years ago vehicles were started with a crank and General Motors innovated and went, okay, from a customer perspective what is the toughest thing in the driving experience? It's crank starting the vehicle. They developed the electric starter and that really opened up the vehicle for people of small stature, for women to drive vehicles because all of a sudden now you weren't cranking. And a funny story I was told and it makes sense because crank starting was hard and it was dangerous—people would sometimes break their arms—that's where the word 'cranky' came from.
So I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes sense to me. But there was just all these innovations that General Motors had very much focused on the customer. How can we make the experience better? And so, you know, General Motors has been around for a hundred years. We've gone through, you know, our ups and our downs, but for me in this role, it was really getting back to that spirit of innovation, but focused on the customer. It wasn't innovation for the sake of innovation, but—
That's an important point. So it wasn't just innovation in some abstract sense.
Exactly. It had to be how are we going to make the car give the customer more features, solve a pain point of driving or of ownership. And that's what we're really instilling now. And I feel—you know, with the vehicles I'm probably not objective, but I feel we have the best portfolio of vehicles we've ever had on the road because we really allowed the people who do the work to continue to innovate and say, you know, how do you make this car great? We told the chief engineers, you know, you should be making the best vehicle you possibly can and if someone's getting in your way, raise your hand. And that has been that spirit. So, it's innovation everywhere, but really reminding people of the rich history that's part of General Motors.
It's so interesting because we went through a period of time in the automotive industry where made in America wasn't always a good line. In fact, you know, despite the grand history, there was a sense that American cars were not as good somehow. That must have been extremely difficult to go through and you were a part of the company and we were coming out on the other side when you came into leadership. But I've often thought that one of the hardest things is to keep people motivated and believing. So how do you think GM came out of that dark corner?
Yeah, I mean I think there's many factors, but I think we lost sight of the customer and understanding really what the customer wanted and also some of the shifts that were happening in the industry. You can't just keep doing what you've always done. And if I mean, yes, you were successful today, but what you did to be successful today doesn't guarantee you're going to be successful tomorrow. So, you have to keep again innovating and understanding the changes that are happening and adapting. And so, I think that was an incredibly hard period of time, but, you know, the customer was telling us what—quality mattered. The functionality of the vehicle, the styling of the vehicle. And one of the things that we have really focused on over the last 15, 20 years is design, excellence, technology that's right for every vehicle, trying to give the customer more and still in an affordable way. And it was really getting everybody back and focused on we don't win till the customer tells us we win.
Right. When you're leading a company that is trying to innovate in this way—well, let me back for a second because you talk about being a complete portfolio company and some of the political winds around what are we going to do about EVs? What are we not going to do about EVs? How do you think about having a steady course when everything around you is moving and now of course issues around tariffs and all, so a lot is in play.
