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Cars and Drivers

GM Plays A Manic Game Of Musical Chairs In The Boardroom

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The government’s game of managing General Motors took another odd turn today as Ed Whitacre, the former CEO of AT&T (T), a man who know about phone lines but not assembly lines was named has chairman of the New GM, the company that the government hopes can emerge from Chapter 11.

For reasons not  clear, Kent Kresa, the former CEO of Northrup Grumman (NOC), will step down.

The remainder of the board will be current members Philip Laskawy, Kathryn Marinello, Erroll Davis Jr, E. Neville Isdell and Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson. Ms. Marinello is head of Ceridian Corporation. Davis is the chancellor of the University System of Georgia. Isdell is the chairman of Coca-Cola (KO). In other words, none of them belong on the board of a car company and not one of them has experience with a turnaround.

Now that the Treasury has anointed these few to oversee the company, the question becomes how much money the taxpayers will have to pour into GM. Even with all of its cost cuts and reduction in debt, if the American car market continues to produce ten million sales a year, it will be hard for the No.1 US auto firm to make money.

With gas approaching $3, GM is in for another hard year.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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