Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (41 page)

I realized gradually, but too late, that if there's anything worse than failing to solicit suggestions from subordinates, it's asking for them and then not giving them serious consideration. How much of my clumsy response came from wanting to avoid confrontations with my vice presidents, how much from my own insecurity about giving up large pieces of my turf, and how much from genuine concern about risks to the company's reputation and/or compliance with regulations, I can't sort out. But I had definitely dropped the ball at a time when cost cutting and streamlining were becoming increasingly essential to the company's survival.

It hit me suddenly that many of the mistakes I was discovering in myself—the tendency to micromanage, the failure to look reality full in the face, to hear what people were really telling me, and to implement
suggestions I had solicited—reflected the sins that had long afflicted the GM culture. Even as I fought so hard to change that culture, was I being co-opted by it, I asked myself?

My sense of self-worth shrank further as it dawned on me that the position of group executive in the corporate staffs arena offered little if any added value and was increasingly resented by other parts of the company as they struggled to downsize their own ranks. The evidence that the role was superfluous moved front and center when the other group executive who reported to Alan retired and was not replaced, so that his staffs now reported directly to Alan while mine still had me in between. It didn't take any time at all to see which staffs felt better positioned. As I did silent battle with Alan for a leadership role on the dual task of streamlining our staffs and shepherding the process of culture change, I gradually realized that he felt as insecure in his position as I did in mine and was trying just as hard as I was to be seen as a positive force for change. Being higher up in the organization than me, and with a much broader reach, he of course won that battle, but in the end he lost the war, a war that dominated my final months at GM and ended a few weeks after I left the company.

Dissatisfied with the way things were going, the GM Board of Directors, led by John Smale, whose leadership skills I'd grown to admire when he was CEO of Procter and Gamble and I was a member of that board, was conducting its own investigation and making its own decisions. The directors felt that change wasn't occurring nearly fast enough and that Stempel was not giving satisfactory answers to the increasingly tough questions they were putting to him.

The first blow of the ax fell at the April 1992 board meeting. Lloyd Reuss was replaced as president by Jack Smith, vice chairman for international operations, and, when Stempel refused to fire Lloyd outright, he was relegated to a marginal job. Bob O'Connell, the chief financial officer whose accounting talents had kept Roger Smith's ship afloat, was also demoted. Alan Smith kept his job but was forced to give up the seat on the Board of Directors that he had held for eleven years, a devastating signal of dissatisfaction from the outside directors. The final blow came six months later, in October, when under irresistible pressure from a public message of no confidence issued by the board, Bob Stempel resigned
as chairman and CEO. Lloyd Reuss, Alan Smith, and Bob O'Connell, along with one or two other holdovers from Roger Smith's era, left the company with him. The senior rank of the old boys' club was gone, clearing the decks for new leadership that would, hopefully, create the kind of company that I, along with like-minded colleagues, had spent my years at GM advocating.

While this top-level drama was unfolding, I tried to push my gnawing loss of self-confidence to the back of my mind as I went about my daily business. I struggled to develop ways of prodding GM on the safety and environmental fronts, teaming up with the group executive for the Technical staffs to develop an integrated approach to these issues. I initiated a dialogue between GM and the Environmental Defense Fund, the first such interaction between an American auto company and an environmental organization.

These initiatives were part of my underlying goal as Public Affairs group executive: to incorporate social considerations into GM's operating decisions. Well before
corporate social responsibility
(CSR) became a buzzword and its promotion a cottage industry, I was trying to persuade my GM colleagues that the link between a company's social reputation and its business performance had indeed gone global. Another way of putting this to my colleagues and superiors was that the outside world's opinion of GM would change—the “windows in” would reveal a new view—only when what we
make
and
do
(our products and our policies) are congruent with what we
are
and
say
(our vision of the company and the claims we make for it). But, with Lloyd Reuss and his rose-colored glasses setting the course, my urgent insistence on a tight link among our product programs, capital allocations, business plans, public positions, and communications strategies didn't have a discernible impact.

My ongoing tensions with Alan Smith—I actually hurled the epithet “You turd” at him when he abandoned me in midsentence to answer a summons from the chairman while we were discussing my future at GM—and my increasing sense that I had become ineffective as an individual and redundant as a line on the organization chart, along with the endless discussions of GM's urgent need for reform but total lack of effective action, combined to throw me into a state of depression. I continued to go to work every day, attend meetings, write memos, and move
endless piles of paper from the inbox to the outbox, but I was increasingly unable to concentrate or enjoy life. After this had gone on for some time, I was miserable enough to seek professional help. The psychiatrist I consulted, a frail-looking man with a wise expression, a sharply beaked nose, and a benign demeanor, wasn't convinced at first that I was clinically depressed. “You're so well-dressed and never cry in my office,” he averred. But my description of my mind as “constantly whirring around like a squirrel in a cage, with no way of stopping to rest,” persuaded him that I needed his help. The combination of a series of talk sessions and an antidepressant put me back on a more or less even keel and also helped me to recognize that it was high time I got out of GM.

In telling Bob Stempel that I intended to retire, I strongly recommended that he abolish not only my job but the entire group executive layer of management in the staff (as opposed to the line) areas of the organization. Bob's immediate response was to express his confidence in me and urge me to propose a more meaningful job for myself somewhere in the GM organization. I was grateful for his courtesy, but, however hard I tried, I lacked the imagination to design such a position, given my current high level in the organization and my nonautomotive background. Basically, I didn't want to. General Motors had become quicksand into which my sanity was rapidly sinking; only total separation, I felt, could save it.

I didn't look forward with any great enthusiasm to my formal retirement dinner at the Detroit Athletic Club or to the gift traditionally presented there to a retiring GM officer, a huge sterling silver tray engraved with the signatures of all my fellow corporate officers, which was called, in company parlance, a pickle dish. But GM's rigid commitment to long-standing rituals and its tendency to lay elaborate plans and then foul up somewhere in their execution combined to turn this particular evening into a nightmare. Jim Fitzpatrick was slated to retire at about the same time as me, a decision arrived at reluctantly by Alan Smith when he discovered, as I had warned him, that Jim was not trusted by the group executives who headed the operating units. The result was that our retirement dinners were combined—a practical, cost-conscious decision. But the news that I would have a man who had become my nemesis as cohonoree made my spirits sink even further.

Following tradition, the full complement of GM officers was seated along one huge table in strict order of rank and seniority. Our progress through numerous dinner courses was punctuated by speeches praising the retiring honorees and videos that memorialized high points in each of our lives. Jim Fitzpatrick's video was first (because I was the more senior of the two, my recognition was scheduled as the evening's windup) and went off without a hitch. Just as mine started, the video machine broke down and resisted all efforts to repair it. Bob Stempel had to extemporize as best he could, but he was fuzzy on the details, and most of the point was lost. When I finally saw the tape, I was touched by the effort that had gone into it and flattered by the comments of people I'd worked with, in government as well as in GM. But the letdown of the evening itself symbolized my frustration and disenchantment as I left the company I had joined with such high expectations for what I might be able to accomplish in a totally new arena.

Bob Stempel and Lloyd Reuss both forged new careers for themselves after leaving GM. Stempel became CEO of Energy Conversion Devices, a Michigan firm known for pioneering work in the development of non-polluting alternative energy sources to power cars and trucks. Reuss, a committed Christian, became the much-admired volunteer executive dean of the Center for Advanced Technologies at Focus: Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides technical training in a variety of fields for inner-city Detroit youths. But for the company they left under duress there has been no such vibrant second life, but rather a humiliating decline into dependency and dismemberment—a fate not even I, GM's resident Cassandra, could have foreseen. That fate has included bankruptcy, a rescue that put the US government in the driver's seat, the forced departure of two CEOs in the space of a year, the sale or abandonment of four of GM's eight vehicle lines, the replacement of most of the Board of Directors, and a management shakeup that promoted a new generation of executives (including Lloyd Reuss's son, Mark) to top positions. Both the company and the new vehicles it is introducing are today commanding new respect. Perhaps, just perhaps, the GM culture against which I did battle in vain has at last been uprooted.

“Well, Marina, you're reaching the crone stage,” opined Margaret Molinari, the expert from Human Resources who had been my in-house consultant on personnel issues, as we chatted about what life after GM might hold for me. Instantly conjuring up a sharp-chinned old witch, I said, “Thanks, Margaret, with a friend like you…” Margaret, a PhD in anthropology, explained that in the anthropological world a crone is not an ugly old woman at all, but rather one whose wisdom and experience made others seek her out for advice and guidance. It took me some time, and some false starts, to find out how right she was.

The career-guidance firm (often called, more bluntly, an outplacement firm) that GM had agreed to pay for when we worked out the conditions of my early retirement, suggested that I explore possibilities for college presidencies, for which my combination of academic and executive experience seemed to make me a natural. But I had been down that road too many times before. Over the space of some twenty years, I had been a finalist for college presidencies several times, in each case backing off at the last minute. After the fourth such episode, my children put the question to me, asking, “Are you sure, Mom, that you really
want
to be a college president?” Thus starkly confronted, I finally decided that the answer was no. The career-guidance firm did perform a valuable service, though. The consultant there told me that, to turn my resume into a marketing pitch, I should set down in bullet points my major
accomplishments at General Motors. Seeing these laid out in succinct black and white made me feel less despairing about what I had actually achieved there, putting closure on that chapter and allowing me to look forward to the next one.

Even during the hectic years at GM, I had at least twice been deeply involved in academic projects focused on broad issues far removed from Detroit and its daily concerns. One was a panel assembled at Notre Dame University at the request of the five Roman Catholic bishops who, after more than five years of study, were composing a pastoral letter on American capitalism, to be presented at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

When I was asked to lay out my own views for the bishops, I told them that, as a non-Catholic, I wasn't used to making confessions even privately, never mind in public. But I overcame my reticence, apparently to good effect, according to
Time
magazine: “Their [the invited experts] testimony sometimes strongly influenced the letter. For example, committee members had been leaning toward a call for strong government economic planning, before hearing that approach sharply criticized by Marina von Neumann Whitman, chief economist for General Motors. After Whitman spoke, one panelist said, ‘Well, there goes the emphasis on central planning.’”
¹
I disagreed with some of the bishops' policy recommendations, but I felt privileged to have been invited to engage in a dialogue with them, particularly since my arguments seemed to have had some impact on a letter that ran to more than a hundred pages.

An even more challenging assignment started with a call in 1998 from Frank Press, a leading physicist who was president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, asking me if I would lead a delegation of ten professors and businessmen to Moscow for a seminar with Soviet academicians and heads of state economic institutions entitled “Economic Growth in Modern Industrial Societies: USSR and USA.” I jumped at the opportunity; we didn't expect to learn much about economic policy or business management from the Russians, but we were curious about their views on economic issues and eager to introduce their leaders to the way a market economy works.

The seminar would have been hard to manage under any circumstances, partly because it was cochaired on the Russian side by academicians
from two competing institutions who clearly hated each other and also because the American and Soviet approaches to analyzing economic problems were so different as to make the two groups' papers mutually unintelligible. What really complicated things for me, though, was that on the second day of the seminar, which was supposed to be led by the Soviet side, all the high-level Russians simply vanished. That left me to try to bring order among presenters whose names I didn't even know how to pronounce and to promote meaningful dialogue between two groups that had in common neither language nor experiences nor modes of thought.

Only later did I learn that the reason for my counterparts' disappearance was a suddenly called special meeting of the Supreme Soviet. Its purpose was to adopt a constitutional amendment implementing General Secretary (later president) Mikhail Gorbachev's plans for political reform, including the democratization of the electoral system, which led to a genuinely democratic election of the Congress of People's Deputies in March of the following year. I reported to Frank Press, “Clearly, this is a unique moment in the Soviet Union, and we may be seeing an important new chapter in their history in the making.”
²
But neither our delegation nor Gorbachev himself had an inkling that the first step toward the demise of Soviet communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union had just been taken in a building close to where we sat.

Now, having closed the book on the GM chapter, I felt the pull to focus once again on the big picture of international issues in the more sustained way that was only possible in an academic setting. Because I wasn't certain how well I would fit back into that world, I decided to test the waters by taking a half-time visiting professorship, divided between the School of Business and the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Gradually, without my actually noticing it, the university began to look less and less like a way station and more and more like a permanent home.

As I settled back into the life of a professor, I taught courses on international trade and investment, combining information and analysis with war stories from the GM trenches to hold the attention of students who were far more demanding than the ones I had taught at the University of Pittsburgh fifteen years before. I also wrote a book that built on my GM
experience to analyze the developments that transformed the dominant, paternalistic multinational corporations of the mid—twentieth century into the lean, mean, global competitors they had become by its end.
³
In his review for the
New York Times Book Review
, Louis Uchitelle complained, “[S]he shares with her readers almost none of what she witnessed at GM or felt in those stressful years…Absent are the anecdotes, the feelings, the judgments from her own experience.”
⁴
Well, Mr. Uchitelle, you have had to wait more than a decade, but here in this memoir is my account of how things looked from the inside.

Most of what I do at the University of Michigan, though, cannot be described in a resume. Having learned as much from my failures in leadership as from my successes as an individual, I try to share the wisdom I've acquired as widely as I can. Now that I no longer have to worry about career building in my specialty, I've been drawn onto advisory committees across the university. More influential, though, than my role in any organized group is the advising and networking I provide informally, one-on-one. I counsel graduate students about their careers and provide my colleagues with from-the-trenches observations on their research. I've worked closely with two successive deans of the Public Policy School, using my broad network of contacts in business and government to help with fund-raising and outreach, as well as serving those same deans as a sounding board on difficult issues.

I sense that I hold more power now, as a part-time, nontenured faculty member—although it is a very soft power indeed—than I did when I was a public figure, high on the organization chart of the U.S. government or the General Motors Corporation. All kinds of people seek my opinion, take it seriously, and even act on it. My credibility comes partly from the wisdom of experience but, even more, from the fact that people know I am not acting for personal gain; I'm not looking for a promotion, a better job, or a big salary increase. Once again, I have a useful double vision; I know the organization as only an insider can, but I have the outsider's disinterestedness and ability to make external comparisons.

Because I am known as a woman who has been there and done that, women and girls at all stages of their lives ask me how I got where I did, what it was like, and how I juggled all the pressures and obligations I felt. The combination of factors that shaped my life included parental
expectations, a steadfastly supportive spouse well ahead of his time, a high energy level, and, most critical of all, good luck. A serious illness in the family or a child with special needs could have brought the whole fragile structure crashing down on me. Timing was also critical; I came of age just as new opportunities were beginning to open up for women, and there were not many women as fully prepared to take advantage of them as I was, thanks to my family environment and the path it set me on early in life.

Timing was critical in another sense as well. I had turned down several promising job opportunities when the children were young, but by the time the GM offer came along, they were grown and more or less independent; I had the career-family conflicts behind me not ahead of me. I tell young women today what I first said twenty-five years ago, that “the myth of the superwoman is dying a well-deserved death. One can't do and be everything at once—the choices and the trade-offs are very real. But there is not just one choice; we have some leeway regarding what we give up at various points in our lives.”
⁵
As I pass on these reflections to others, I see that Margaret Molinari was right about the meaning of the “crone stage” after all.

My year of moving on from GM, 1992, was highlighted by two far more personal milestones: Laura's wedding to David Downie in June and my mother's death in December. The wedding was one of those perfect occasions that I would have liked to preserve intact forever but had to settle instead for joyous memories and glorious photographs. Laura's beauty as a bride brought tears to her parents' eyes; David was a beaming, handsome groom, having even cut his unruly curls for the occasion. They were married at St. Andrews, the Episcopal Church whose gray stone grandeur marks it as one of the oldest churches in Ann Arbor. The bride and groom wrote large parts of their own marriage service, which was designed to allow a number of their closest friends, whether Christian, Jewish, or agnostic, to participate in the ceremony without being made to feel uncomfortable.

On that glorious June day, the guests at the reception had a panoramic view of the entire city from the four-sided terrace that encircles the top floor of the university's magnificent, art deco Rackham Building. A trio of violin, harp, and flute played classical music softly before and
through dinner, but afterward the bridal pair and their friends, who had gathered from all over the world, danced to the earsplitting beat of a steel drum band. It was a fabulous send-off.

For my mother, that occasion represented the fulfillment of a long-delayed dream. My own wedding had been a small, low-key affair, out of respect for my father's terminal illness. Now she could help plan and be part of the sort of elegant, formal event that she had to forego thirty-five years earlier. But her granddaughter's wedding marked one of the few happy days my mother spent during her brief life in Ann Arbor. Physically frail and beset by depression, she was no longer able to deal with her husband's dementia. These developments forced me to recognize, painfully, that my mother, the awesome figure who had been both my role model and the primary source of my lifelong feelings of insecurity, was now old and vulnerable and desperately in need of support from her children. My brother George and I felt that the only solution was to move her and Desmond from their Long Island home of more than forty years to a retirement residence in Ann Arbor.

We had made this decision with the best of intentions, but our plan misfired badly, leaving George and me with a sense of guilt that haunts us to this day. My mother, torn from her home and her circle of friends and too embarrassed by her husband's mental state to make new ones, was thoroughly miserable, ate almost nothing, and dwindled down to eighty-five pounds. This was one case where superwoman fell badly down on the job. Distracted and exhausted by my battles at GM, I failed to notice how desperately she craved my support. While George and I were away with our families for Thanksgiving—a desertion for which she never forgave us, even though we had invited her to come along with us to our vacation cottage—she had a bad fall.

Although her injury, a hyperextended neck that damaged several vertebrae, would not have been life threatening to a person in good health, it did mean a difficult surgery and an extended, uncomfortable recovery. Confronted with this prospect, my mother developed a variety of complications that led ultimately to her death. Her physical frailty may have made this outcome inevitable, but I couldn't help but be reminded of her own mother who, when her quality of life fell below her minimum standard,
simply willed herself to die. In my heart, I wondered if my mother, a proud and stubborn woman, hadn't come to the same decision.

In death, my mother went home to the church she had attended for more than forty years, the one where Bob and I had been married, and to a grave in its churchyard. The occasion was marked by the worst storm Long Island had seen in many years. The car in which Malcolm, Laura, and David drove to the funeral was the last one allowed across the Throgs Neck Bridge from Connecticut, trucks floated on the roads running along Long Island Sound, and the basement of our hotel was flooded, cutting off all electrical power. The funeral service was conducted by candlelight and without the electric organ; a fire truck stood by outside, lest the sparks shooting out of a short-circuited transformer close to the church should start a fire. The rain pelted down on us as we stood at the graveside; it seemed a fitting farewell to a woman as tempestuous as my mother. We privately dubbed the storm “Hurricane Mariette.”