General Motors: Back from the Dead | In With the New | 1

Business Movers

Wondery

History, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

General Motors is America’s carmaker, an empire that helped build Detroit Motor City. Since 1908, General Motors has been a key driver of the workforce, the economy and American culture. But in 2008, the once-thriving car business came to a screeching halt. In the wake of the Great Recession, an engineer turned human resources executive named Mary Barra [BAR-uh] rises to power at General Motors and helps bring America’s automaker back from the dead.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the 1990s in a small office at the General Motors Assembly Plant in Fairfax, Kansas.
0:21.3	Mary Bara, a low-level GM manager of manufacturing planning, rubs her tired eyes and repeats
0:27.0	the same phrase she's been saying for at least the past hour.
0:30.0	John, we aren't going to make better cars unless we start doing things differently.
0:35.0	John, a plant manager from Kansas, sighs with frustration as he throws a set of engineering
0:40.2	plants on his desk.
0:41.6	Mary watches, she stands, and paces around the small office about the factory floor.
0:46.0	Ah, differently, differently.
0:49.8	Why do we have to waste time doing things differently if it works just fine the way it is?
0:55.0	Mary has just finished telling John that his assembly plant will soon be making a new
0:58.9	model of the Pontiac Grand Prix.
1:01.6	But this time, John and his crew will be using an entirely new system of production.
1:06.5	One Mary created herself.
1:08.1	Now she… that's the problem, John.
1:10.6	The way we make cars overall isn't fine.
1:13.1	It's not even good.
1:14.8	Every plant has its own system of doing things.
1:16.8	What takes your plant three months to do would take flants six months.
1:20.2	I think that proves my point.
1:22.2	I've been making cars as long as you've been alive.
1:24.7	There aren't any better systems out there than this one.
1:27.1	Look, I trust that you and your team are the best at what you do, John.
	...

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