Mary Barra

CEO of General Motors

• Born: December 24, 1961
• Place of Birth: Waterford, Michigan

Education: GMI Engineering and Management Institute; Stanford University

Background

Mary Barra was born Mary Teresa Makela on December 24, 1961, in Waterford, Michigan, to Ray and Eva Makela. Her father worked for Pontiac, one of several car brands owned by General Motors (GM), for nearly four decades. As the daughter of a longtime GM employee, Barra grew up immersed in the world of car manufacturing. She loved GM cars and particularly admired a vintage Chevrolet Camaro owned by a cousin. As a teenager, Barra wanted to buy a Pontiac Firebird, a sporty muscle car, but instead opted for a more affordable and practical—but slow and clunky—Chevrolet Chevette. Having to compromise between practicality and style influenced her later philosophy in designing cars for GM.

Barra graduated from Waterford Mott High School in 1980. That year she took her first job at GM, participating in the company’s cooperative education program. She divided the year between working in a Pontiac manufacturing plant and studying electrical engineering at GMI Engineering and Management Institute (later known as Kettering University), a GM-affiliated university in Flint, Michigan. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1985. She later attended the Stanford University Graduate School of Business on a GM fellowship, earning a master’s degree in business administration in 1990.

General Motors

After completing her bachelor’s degree, Barra began working for GM full time, taking on a variety of roles within the company over the following decades. She served for a time as an engineer in the Pontiac plant where she had worked as a student and later was named manager of manufacturing planning. In 1996 she took the position of executive assistant to GM’s chief executive officer (CEO) and vice chair.

Barra next worked in internal communications for a time before being named manager of an assembly plant that manufactured such cars as the Buick LeSabre. She became executive director of vehicle manufacturing in 2004, and was then appointed vice president of global manufacturing engineering in 2008. She served in this position until July 2009.

Like many other American car companies, GM struggled during the global recession that began in 2008. Rising gas prices and a general economic downturn decreased sales severely, and in June 2009, GM filed for bankruptcy. The company survived the period in large part thanks to a government bailout. Shortly after the bankruptcy filing, which led to reorganization within the company and made clear the need for major changes in the immediate future, GM leadership named Barra vice president of global human resources. She remained in the position until early 2011, when she became senior vice president of global product development. Barra next served as executive vice president of global product development and global purchasing and supply chain from August 2013 to January 2014.

In late 2013 it was announced that GM CEO Dan Akerson planned to retire, and the company’s leaders had assembled a short list of potential candidates to fill his position, Barra among them. By the middle of December, following much speculation, Barra was named as Akerson’s successor. She officially began serving as CEO on January 15, 2014.

Barra had the difficult task of managing GM’s continued financial recovery and regaining the attention and trust of car buyers in the United States and abroad. She faced significant scrutiny several months into her tenure, when a government investigation revealed that some individuals at GM had known about a dangerous defect in certain cars that had been implicated in a number of deaths but had chosen not to order a recall. In response to this controversy, which had been brewing for a decade prior to her appointment as CEO, Barra apologized on behalf of the company and noted that delays in rectifying such issues were unacceptable under her leadership. As part of the response to that crisis, Barra gave testimony before Congress in 2014.

As CEO, Barra became known for analyzing GM’s products not from the viewpoint of an engineer or an executive but from that of the customer, making decisions based on factors such as comfort, design, and ease of use. She encouraged compromise and coordination among engineers and sought to improve efficiency, which in turn would decrease manufacturing costs. GM had a history of costly production delays and even cancellation of vehicles, and Barra acknowledged that if that trend continued, the company would continue to struggle.

Under Barra's leadership, GM cut once-popular product lines, prioritized price over sales volume, pulled out of the Indian, Russian, and South African markets, and sold two legacy European brands. Instead, it pivoted toward autonomous vehicle technology, battery electric car production, and investments in the ride-sharing space and the highly competitive Chinese market. Along with those changes, Barra announced multiple US plant closures in 2018 and 2019 and responded to the company's largest labor strike in decades in the fall of 2019, meeting not only with United Auto Workers leaders but also President Donald Trump and White House officials.

Barra remained in her role as CEO of GM throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. The pandemic presented worldwide complications for many automakers, who soon suffered from both supply chain issues and a lack of demand during the initial stages of the virus's spread. As the pandemic persisted, the demand for vehicles soon returned, but the supply chain issues continued, leading to a situation where a shortage of parts prevented many manufacturers, including GM, from producing enough vehicles to meet consumer demand. GM, suffering from a lack of vital vehicular computer components, had an estimated unfinished 95,000 vehicles in reserve in 2022 as the company waited for shipments of necessary parts.

In June 2022, Barra announced that GM was aiming to produce solely electric vehicles by the year 2035.

In addition to being GM’s CEO, Barra served as a member of Kettering University’s board of trustees. She received the Kettering Alumni Association’s management achievement award in 2010. She was a board member for General Dynamics Corporation from 2011 to 2017, joined the board for Walt Disney Company in 2017, and chaired the board of directors for GM beginning in 2016.

Impact

As the first female CEO of GM, Barra represented a major change in the automotive industry, a male-dominated realm that had long been considered inhospitable to women. In recognition of her work, she was ranked second on Fortune magazine's list of the world’s most powerful women in business and fifth on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s hundred most powerful women for 2019. Barra was included in both the 2021 Forbes 50 Over 50 and Time's 2021 list of the hundred most influential people in the world. In 2023, she was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

Bibliography

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"Mary Barra." The Automotive Hall of Fame, 2024, www.automotivehalloffame.org/honoree/mary-barra/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

"Mary T. Barra." General Motors. General Motors, 2024, www.gm.com/company/leadership.detail.html/Pages/bios/global/en/corporate-officers/Mary-Barra. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

McGregor, Jena. "The Rundown on Mary Barra, First Female CEO of General Motors." Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/12/10/the-rundown-on-mary-barra-first-female-ceo-of-general-motors/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Nisen, Max. "How Mary Barra Went from Inspecting Fender Panels to GM’s First Female CEO." Yahoo Finance, 10 Dec. 2013, finance.yahoo.com/news/mary-barra-went-inspecting-fender-182912108.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Tankersley, Jim. "What Drives Mary Barra." Stanford Alumni, Sept/.Oct. 2011, stanfordmag.org/contents/what-drives-mary-barra. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Valdes-Dapena, Peter. “Meet the CNN Business Risk Takers of 2019.” CNN, Cable News Network, 10 Mar. 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/business/gm-ceo-mary-barra-profile/index.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.