From his excellent
Substack which you should totally subscribe to.
Why are so many executives worse than a flipped coin?
You could make a zillion dollars just doing the opposite of what she does
Yesterday, we looked at how General Motors has been both careless and greedy with their full-sized truck strategy — and yet other than the Corvette and the Korean outsourced stuff I think it’s fair to say that everything else they do is handled with even less competence than are the trucks. Since then, I’ve been asking myself: Why are so many executives so bad at their jobs?
If a heart surgeon had Mary Barra’s record, he’d have been sued out of business in his first year. A cop or fireman with her judgment would likely be dead by now. Hell, if the kid cooking burgers at McDonald’s got it wrong as often as she does, the franchise would have been pulled. If you take some time and look at every public decision she’s made since taking over as CEO, in addition to evaluating some actions at GM that she must have approved, her record is something like 2 for 30. If every decision ever put to Barra had instead been decided by the flip of a coin, there’s a good mathematical chance that GM would have a Gen4 Volt right now, or engines that don’t blow up, or a sedan that people want to buy, or at least a lot more money in the bank. We’d have a 50 percent chance of not having the showroom-paperweight $whatever_IQ Cadillacs, or the Hummer EV, the first electric car in history to offend people who love electric cars in addition to offending normal people.
Here’s the problem: I don’t think she’s really a stupid person, not in the sense of IQ or ability to understand basic concepts of logic and reason. She’d probably have been a great window-switch engineer. You meet a lot of leaders like that. I worked a couple of steps away from a CEO who was obviously an intelligent, insightful, witty person — but he was unable to resist doing the bidding of other, more forceful men who repeatedly beguiled him into making them rich at his own expense.
There’s something about being a CEO that causes otherwise worthwhile men and women to pick up the Idiot Ball and dance around with it. Their decisions are often obviously wrong to the people on the front lines of the company, but it doesn’t matter. I have a theory about this, to which I’ll return a week from now, but it would be idiotic of me not to let all of you talk about it first, so I can steal your best ideas and say they were mine.