通用CEO谈未来发展

    另外一种让我们尤为动心的技术是氢燃料电池技术，它在这个十年内可能还无法实现。但它将是汽车行业的终极目标。

    在您职业生涯早期，最为人们熟知的是您对客户需求的关注，而不是工程师或其他内部人员的需求。如今，通用汽车是否也充分做到了以消费者为核心？

    还没有，但我们正在逐步改善。我们最近刚刚任命了一位优秀的女士（艾丽西亚•鲍勒-戴维斯）担任公司副总裁，负责客户体验业务——从汽车行业来看，这是一个全新的任命思路。她在通用汽车工作了10年，曾参与一款核心产品的研发，并负责管理生产该产品的工厂。所以，她在基层拥有很好的口碑。她曾经历过汽车的设计与制造。对于我们而言，客户体验不仅是将汽车建造得更加可靠和耐久，并以质量为导向，还包括汽车设计、生产、销售的方式以及售后服务。我们将坚持完全以数据为依据，而不是感情用事。通用汽车必将改善市场对我们的认识，对此，我抱有很大的信心。

    您肯定掌握了大量客户数据，但是，如果贵公司和我采访过的其他公司一样，无论这些数据的价值如何，你们并没有对这些数据加以利用。这点是否合理？

    事实上，我们非常重视公司的IT系统。之前，客户信息数据仓储并不是公司的优势，甚至完全没有过，但未来我们肯定会有。

    目前，美国财政部仍持有通用汽车26%的股份。这是否会阻碍公司的发展？

    从某些方面说是这样的，但也不尽然。近期的一份调查显示，部分人表示，只要政府持有公司股份，他们就不会购买通用汽车的车。我认为，相当一部分买车的人持有的还是强烈的自由市场经济观点。我也不例外。

    但如果通用汽车和克莱斯勒（Chrysler）倒闭，很大一部分供应链必然会崩溃。制造商、博格华纳（BorgWarner）、德尔福公司（Delphi）、伟世通公司（Visteon）等供应链各方，以及代理商，雇佣的总人数达到了800万人。这意味着，一旦通用汽车和克莱斯勒倒闭，每年将危及5,000亿美元的工资和700亿美元的税收。此外，还要考虑它给社会造成的破坏：人们流离失所，孩子失去进入大学深造的机会等等。一个人一辈子总要为自己的人民做点什么。我们的两届政府都具有非凡的勇气和领导能力勇敢地站出来。不论是重组还是破产，都会有许多种解决途径。而我们选择了正确的道路。

    您曾经想过自己有一天会成为通用汽车的CEO吗？

    从没有想过。

    And then there's one we feel strongly about, which probably won't happen in this decade, and that's hydrogen fuel-cell technology. It's kind of the nirvana of where this eventually goes.

    You were well known in earlier careers for being highly focused on what matters to customers vs. what may matter to engineers or other insiders. Is GM sufficiently customer-centric today?

    Not yet, but we're getting better. We just named a very talented young woman [Alicia Boler-Davis] vice president of customer experience -- that's a new kind of perspective from an automotive point of view. She's been with us about 10 years, helped develop one of our key products, and managed a plant that produced it. So she's got street cred. She's seen the vehicle designed and built. For us the customer experience is not only making the vehicle reliable and durable and quality-oriented, but also how it was designed, manufactured, sold, and the post-sale. We're going to be very, very data-driven rather than episodically driven. I hold great hopes for the improvement of how we're perceived in the marketplace.

    You must have a tremendous amount of customer data, but if you're like many companies I talk to, you haven't been using it for all it's worth. Is that fair?

    We're looking at our IT systems real hard. Data warehousing of customer information was not a strength in the company. Maybe it wasn't even existent, but it will be in the future.

    The U.S. Treasury still owns 26% of GM. Is that an impediment to the company's performance?

    Yes and no. A recent survey showed there's a percentage of people who say that as long as the company has government ownership, they'll not buy a car from General Motors. I think there's a certain percentage of the buying public that has a very free-market perspective on the economy. I do too.

    But had General Motors and Chrysler gone down, it's reasonable to say that a good part of the supply chain would have collapsed. The manufacturers, the supply-chain folks like BorgWarner, Delphi, Visteon, and others, plus the dealerships employ 8 million people. That represents $500 billion a year in payroll and $70 billion in taxes that would have been at risk. And the social destruction -- people losing their homes, children not being able to go to college -- every once in a while you have to do something for your citizens. Two administrations had the courage and the leadership to stand up. Whenever there's a restructuring or a bankruptcy, there are multiple paths to resolution. We took the right path.

    Did you ever think you'd be CEO of General Motors?

    Never.