Mary Barra has led General Motors through one of the most turbulent periods in the company’s history — from COVID to chip shortages, tariffs, and the transition to EVs.
She’s also the CEO who ultimately signed off on the decision to shut down Holden, ending more than 160 years of the brand’s presence in Australia.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview with Automotive News last week, Ms Barra emphasised that her focus is not on personal legacy, but on reshaping GM’s culture to ensure the company can adapt and thrive for decades to come.
“I’m kind of focused on the business, not so much on my legacy, but I think, creating the right culture at GM, where we keep learning and growing. I want to make sure GM is here for the next 20 years, 50 years, 100 years,” she said.
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“So it’s making those investments, but it’s also the culture, this culture of continuing to learn and grow and be curious. And so hopefully we’re creating that culture that’s going to continue to propel GM forward many, many decades into the future.”
Ms Barra contrasted GM’s old way of working – rigid annual portfolio reviews and top-down product decisions – with a new, more flexible model of constant reassessment.
“There was a point in time in my career where we’d work on the portfolio plan going forward, and we would do it [in a a way that]… was an annual process, trust me, it’s not an annual process anymore,” she said.
Now, she explained, the company builds optionality into programs.
“As we were planning a new program, you know, how many different versions of the vehicle did we do? We had those choices that we could make, but we didn’t have to make them the minute we started the program. And so we literally told the team, ‘hey, tell us when you need this decision from us to keep it on track’.”
This agility, she argued, allows GM to better match production and product mix to market realities, regulatory changes, and customer demand.
“We had a lot more information a year, 15 months, 18 months later, to say, ‘Okay, with this information, this is the decision’. And I think that kind of shows the agility that we’ve developed at General Motors.”
Ms Barra admitted that the past 18 months in particular have required constant pivots as regulatory timelines and emissions standards shifted.
“If you go back, say, 18 months ago, we were on a path where we were working to a 2030 goal with fairly stringent emission standards,” she said.
“In fact, even with the previous [US] administration, I was making sure they understood, in my view [that] they were getting ahead of the customer with where the regulatory environments were going. I think that’s a dangerous point in a situation like this.”
The ability to make “a 10 per cent tweak here, a 20 per cent tweak there,” rather than lock into five-year plans, is what she sees as GM’s cultural transformation.
For Australians, Ms Barra’s words carry a sharper edge. It was under her leadership that GM wound down Holden, though the end of local manufacturing was announced prior to her ascending to the top spot at the company back in 2014.
The end of local manufacturing was announced in 2013, with the final locally built Holden rolling off the production line in 2017. The brand was then axed entirely in 2020.
GM had argued Holden had become unsustainable given its scale in the global business.
Ms Barra’s focus on agility and responsiveness raises an uncomfortable counterfactual: if GM had embraced this culture earlier, could Holden have been repositioned rather than retired?
She insists GM is now better placed to respond to fast-changing conditions. “It’s [now] not just here’s the plan, go execute, and don’t pay attention to anything else that’s happening around you,” she said.
Ms Barra downplays the idea of shaping a legacy, but acknowledges the cultural reset may prove to be her most lasting achievement.
For Australians, though, Ms Barra’s legacy is more complicated, given she was the CEO who shut down Holden. That decision reflects the same hard-headed pragmatism she now touts as a strength – but for many, it also symbolises the loss of an iconic part of Australia’s motoring identity.