WTF? A business is a business??? apparently it’s not that easy!!

There’s truth to that statement. But… “a union is a union” and you’re still burdened with that blood sucking leach.

Is it just me or does this guy look like Goerge Bush sr.?

‘The Drew’ comes thru… ftw;-)) Andrew,You could’ve saved me some grief with this yesterday;-) Oh well… it’s all good…

DB9;-)

lol

I suppose it’s better than “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”.

LOL, now we know 1115’s true identity!

I guess he was the only one to return their call.

If he doesn’t know anything about cars, why is he a great choice? At least Mulally used to work with something that involved transportation and had to be manufactured.

Geez – Good luck though – as my tax dollars lie on his success.

Wow he does look li GB senior, anybodys better than Lutz the Putz, and i cant do anyting Wagner, I really dont thin GM will be around much longer than this guy so i guess its a good match. GM rusted !

he looks more like an old Steve Jobs

I’m in disbelief that anybody would compare this guy to Mulally.

As always, GM continues to remain misguided.

Seems like a good decision, all around. I don’t think running AT&T woudl have been *that* different than Mullaly running Boeing. Whitacre, also, had to R&D, manufacture, and sell products that people wanted for the least cost. Business is business. There probably needs to be more strictly-business people heading car companies these days.

And keep in mind, that Whitacre is chairman, he’s not a CEO like Mullaly was. We’ll see just what kind of influence Whitacre ends up having.

I can see the headline — Whitacre is confident the AztekII is just the product to bring people back to GM showrooms.

AWESOME this guys fits right in to GM!….

This is great news for AT&T however. Now that their crap will unravel, there will be someone to blame. So much you can do with books of only one company.

Jesus we’re all ****ed.

what a freakin joke

The previous ones didn’t know anything either, so how can it get worse?

Didn’t I propose to keep UAW on payroll till their natural death and/or retirement and save us 98 billions? So the company got new CEO who should be retired and knows zilch about cars (or car business). So it will take another 50 billions to educate him to a point of closing the company completely. Keeping UAW/CAW lazy a$$es on payroll will cost less then whole GM alive.

lol…..
The funnier part is that Edward Whitacre is a Right Wing Republican, and the Grand Old Party just put a boycott on all GM products due to the “Government Intervention”

Finger that out….

I can’t fault him for being a Republican, but being a St. Louisian, he did move the HQ for SW Bell to dallas, which became SBC and is now AT&T, would have been nice to have their HQ here for jobs still, he also had a large part in negotiations on AB to InBev, so I guess I have some anger towards this guy.

Well it was good while it lasted when GM was the world auto leader. The best he could do is offer a free BlackBerry or iPhone with a new car, along with three months of free cell phone service.

Ah, gee look at that Cool Dawg… Ed get no respect from the Girlz:-)) I guess Rattner shouldn’t have suggested him to Kresna…

DB9;-)

That’s OK. The majority owner, the US Government, doesn’t know anything about cars either.

Shades of Cliff Barnes.

Oh well.
39 more Whitacres and a Whitmule …

call my cautious, but i’d like to see some evidence this guy needs to be dbagged before he’s dbagged…

so….will he be the banks CEO alike that only got pay to do nothing??

Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics, your cheque is in the mail. Let’s face the facts here – AT&T is absolutely loathed by customers. “He was one of the guys who helped create a new AT&T that wasn’t so dependent on land-line phone service.” That’s right! He did using by using mergers and acquisitions developing a piss-poor cellular service at the same time and ignored the land-lined services as well. Everybody knows the US cell phone networks are a joke compared to Europe and most of Asia. They are slow to innovate and therefore slow to react.

He’ll fit right in with GM status quo mentality.

Im sorry WHAT????? A business is a business yes but still you need to know about your product you tool….

He just might be the right man for the job… he started with AT&T 40 years ago, stringing telephone lines or something, and worked his way up to the high ranks through the 1984 Divestiture, and since the telecom act of 1996, reassembled a sizable chunk of the Bell System into a highly profitable and competitive company.

It’d be nice if the business types stuck to bean countin’ and left the engineering to the engineers. But turning out a decent product AND having strait books is probably unethical.

Olds307
Sure, that is good, but no doubt they could have found someone who also did something similar…AND also knew a thing or two about cars! That would be even better!

Is ignorance bliss?
Only GM knows
DrFill

good news for Japanese and Koreans. soon or the later, US taxpayer will bail out GM again….

GM hasn’t had a car guy since Bob Stempel (and they didn’t even give him a chance after the Roger Smith debacle), so…”Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

“Whitacre, born and raised in Ennis, Texas, ” Ennis, is that in the County of Agina???

The Stig – What is wrong with our cell infrastructure? Honestly, what’s wrong? We have broadband internet access. You can watch television on a phone these days, video conference… Is there something you are desperately missing? Perhaps your misplaced frustration should be more appropriately focused on the government and the FCC… If you are still dependent on a twisted pair land line, there’s a typewriter on ebay for ya as well.

I don’t know this guy from any other CEO, but I do know his duties call for everything besides automotive knowledge. He doesn’t need to know any more automotive jargon than the CEO of Quizno’s needs to know how to cook. There are CEOs for innovating, there are CEOs for maintaining, there are CEOs for growth, and there are CEOs for fixing a broken organization. Raising the Titanic from the depths of the ocean requires an engineer, not a ship’s captain. A captain is put in place once the ship has been righted and operable.

The last thing he needed to do was say that in public.
Image is everything.
Who wants to buy a car from a company run by a bean-counter?

We’re enthusiasts. The general public are not. We want a car guy, the general public most likely doesn’t care. We want fun, drivable cars that we like, while the general public wants appliances. A guy that doesn’t know anything about cars is probably more inclined to push for a decent looking appliance because he is one of “them”. He is of the general public. He is of the crowd that we enthusiasts do not like nor understand. Unfortunately, there are more of them than there are of us, and therefore, appliances are what will win. I’m sad because it may mean the death of some great driver’s cars, but GM may turn out to be an American Toyota because of this, and that is what seems to be working among the general public.

Think of it this way

You own a restaurant (American Taxpayers). Your restaurant (GM) needs a new head chef (CEO of GM). So you hire someone that has no expertise in the culinary arts, but he has managed a garbage removal company with mixed success.

So yes a head chef does manage food cost, to which he will have skills for.

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY where this new head chef lacks is in vision for new menu’s (new technologies), pairing up high quality foods together at a resasonable price for the public (ensuring great cars that are priced properly), and the knowledge of how to create something that the public would enjoy (creating a product that car buyers want).

That is the number one reason why GM will not be successful.

Well that’s assuring.

For some strange reason, this reminds me of Secretary of Defense McNamara …
(Hey who knows, we could go firebombing Toyota plants if GM can’t get sales up…)

Eh, forgive my cynicism.

GM will get through!

-eat your cereal

But Omnicient, this guy isn’t the head chef of GM. He’s more the general manager, or the guy that hires the head chef. In that way, he may be okay. Only time will tell.

I for one am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, it was stupid of him to say that he has no knowledge of cars. That was a bad move. Period.

And yeah, he does look like Bush. But I think more a mix of Senior and Dubya.

Omniscient – Your head chef analogy works better for the vice presidents. All of the tasks you mentioned are exactly what the VPs are for. Like him or not, Bob Lutz is in charge of vehicle design. The CEO needs to oversee everything. That includes its non automotive subsidiaries like GMAC, parts supply, factories, etc… The CEO is there to keep the VPs a cohesive bunch working in the same direction.