Word: gm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brief tenure atop GM, Stempel presided over two consecutive years of red ink -- including the largest annual loss ever by an American company, $4.5 billion in 1991. Stempel had tried to stanch the bleeding with a plan to close 21 plants and eliminate 74,000 jobs, but a year later the company had trimmed only 35,000 jobs and had still not decided which plants to shut...
...GM's board is expected to split Stempel's job in two, promoting president John Smith to CEO and installing as chairman John Smale, retired Procter & Gamble chairman and leader of the directors aligned against Stempel. But GM's problems go back to the free-spending 1980s, when the company invested billions in computer and aircraft firms rather than finding new ways to build better cars, and it will take more than a boardroom coup to turn that around. (See Cover Stories beginning on page...
GENERAL MOTORS GOT RID OF THE WRONG GUY LAST WEEK. BOB Stempel is not responsible for the disaster at GM. That distinction belongs to Roger B. Smith, Stempel's predecessor as chairman, made infamous in the film Roger & Me. As CEO from 1981 to 1990, Smith designed and executed the strategy that has impoverished the industrial giant. Stempel was laboring to undo the damage when GM's board forced him to fall on his sword after little more than two years on the job. By week's end the directors reportedly began moving to give Smith a final shove...
Smith occupies a comfortable $26,000-a-year seat on the GM board. Each time he actually attends a board meeting, he gets an extra $1,000. He earns an additional $12,000 a year for sharing his thoughts with the other members of the finance committee. GM provides him with a company car and an office as well. The capper is his retirement package, which a GM spokesman describes as "in the range of $1 million a year." This is his reward for a decade of stewardship in which the company lost 10 percentage points of U.S. car-market...
...only interview Smith granted after last week's coup, he bristled at such criticism and sought to burnish his legacy, telling the Detroit Free Press that Electronic Data Systems, which GM bought in 1984 for $2.5 billion, is now worth seven times that amount and that Hughes Aircraft ($5 billion in 1985) has doubled in value. "That's not too shabby," Smith said. "I think I gave GM a little bit of money to see 'em through...