American Turnaround

**Author:** Edward E. Whitacre **Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

How a plain-spoken Texan took the wheel of a dying American icon and drove it back to profitability. You will learn why GM's collapse was a failure of management rather than markets, how bureaucracy strangles accountability, and what happens when a leader refuses to accept excuses. You will also learn the decision-making principles Whitacre used at AT&T to bet on an unproven device called the iPhone, and how those same principles revived General Motors.

This book is for leaders who inherit broken organizations and must act quickly. It is for managers frustrated by endless meetings and unclear authority. It is for anyone who suspects that the people inside a company usually know how to fix it, if only someone would listen and then get out of their way. It is for readers who want to understand how one of America's largest bankruptcies became one of its most surprising recoveries.

General Motors did not fail because of the financial crisis. It failed because it had forgotten how to run itself. For decades, the company that once defined American industrial might had been sliding toward irrelevance, losing market share, burning cash, and burying its problems under layers of management complexity. The 2008 financial crisis did not cause GM's collapse. It exposed it. By the time GM filed for bankruptcy in June 2009, the company had lost more than $80 billion in the previous four years. It employed over 200,000 people worldwide. It owed billions to bondholders, suppliers, and the United States government. The federal government, facing the prospect of a million lost jobs and the collapse of a manufacturing supply chain, stepped in with a $50 billion bailout. In exchange, taxpayers received a 61 percent ownership stake in the company. The label came quickly: Government Motors. It stung. It suggested that GM was no longer a real company but a ward of the state, a charity case kept alive by politicians. Employees felt the shame. Dealers felt it. Customers felt it. The company that had once sold half the cars in America was now a symbol of failure. Into this mess stepped Edward E. Whitacre Jr., a man who had spent his entire career in the telephone business. He was seventy years old, retired, and living on a ranch in Texas when the Obama administration asked him to become chairman of the new GM. He had never worked in the auto industry. He had never managed a manufacturing company. He had never been through a bankruptcy. What he had done was build the largest telecommunications company in the world. Starting as a facilities engineer at Southwestern Bell in 1963, Whitacre had climbed through…