Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies - the New York Times

12/4/2018 Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies - The New York Times BUSINESS DAY Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies By MICHELINE MAYNARD DEC. 1, 2007 Roger B. Smith, the General Motors executive who tried to modernize the American automotive giant during the 1980s but instead became associated with its decline, died Thursday in suburban Detroit. He was 82. Tom Wilkinson, a G.M. spokesman, said Mr. Smith died after a short illness. G.M. did not give the cause. Mr. Smith, who was the company’s chairman and chief executive from 1981 to 1990, became widely known to filmgoers in 1989 as the involuntary focus of the satiric documentary “Roger & Me,” which started Michael Moore’s career as a director. Mr. Smith was “almost a character in Greek tragedy, the great man with the tragic flaw,” said Marina von Neumann Whitman, who was a G.M. vice president during Mr. Smith’s tenure and is now a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan. Douglas A. Fraser, who was president of the United Automobile Workers union while Mr. Smith was chief executive, said of him, “He tried to change the corporation, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.” Mr. Smith led G.M. during one of the most wrenching decades in the history of the company and the automobile industry. As the 1980s began, G.M. sat atop the https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01smith.html?register=facebook 1/7 12/4/2018 Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies - The New York Times automobile industry, as it had since the end of World War II, with 46 percent of American market share. But by the time Mr. Smith retired, in 1990, G.M. held only 35 percent of the American market, with a lineup of look-alike automobiles blemished by poor quality. Customers were turning to Japanese companies and resurgent Detroit players like the Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler Corporation. Variously described as arrogant and casual in manner, with ruddy skin and a high-pitched voice, Mr. Smith remained a controversial figure in Detroit long after he had left the automotive scene. “Roger Smith’s tenure was one of the darkest in General Motors’ history, for customers, workers and for residents of G.M.’s factory towns,” the consumer advocate Ralph Nader said in 1995. But G.M.’s current chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said yesterday that Mr. Smith “knew that we have to accept change, understand change and learn to make it work for us.” “Roger was truly a pioneer in the fast-moving global industry that we now take for granted,” Mr. Wagoner said. Roger Bonham Smith was born July 12, 1925, in Columbus, Ohio, the son of E. Quimby Smith and Bess Obetz Smith, and moved to Detroit as a youngster. He attended high school in Detroit and received his undergraduate and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Michigan. He joined G.M. after serving in the Navy in World War II and spent his entire career there, rising through its financial ranks at a time when the company chose its chief executive from among its “bean counters.” One of his first steps after becoming chief executive in 1981 was to order a reorganization of G.M.’s far-flung operations, which had been decentralized since the days of its legendary president, Alfred P. Sloan. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01smith.html?register=facebook 2/7 12/4/2018 Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies - The New York Times Under Mr. Smith, the company branched out to explore new technologies, like robotics, electronics and data processing. It bought Hughes Electronics, as well as Electronic Data Systems, known as E.D.S. But many of Mr. Smith’s steps added layers of complexity, at times bringing the company to a virtual standstill while managers sorted out who would take responsibility. Even Mr. Smith voiced frustration at the outcome. “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if I could have flipped a switch and it would have been done?” he said in a 1995 interview. “To his credit, he knew something was wrong there, so he began an age of frantic experimentation,” said James P. Womack, chief executive of the Lean Enterprise Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the co-author of “The Machine That Changed the World,” a study of Japanese factories in the United States. Mr. Smith’s name is associated with a number of automotive disasters. One was the GM-10 project, a series of cars shared by G.M.’s different brands intended to establish a more efficient way of product development but ended up being an experiment that ultimately cost the company $7 billion. The cars, as well as other models sold by G.M.’s divisions, were derided for looking too much alike; Lincoln lampooned them in an ad for its luxury cars. “In the end some terrible damage was done” to G.M.’s reputation, said Jon Lowell, a veteran Detroit automotive journalist. Mr. Smith had better success with a joint venture with the Toyota Motor Company to build small cars in California. He made the first gesture to Toyota’s chief executive, Eiji Toyoda, a member of the company’s founding family. Protectionist threats against Japan were mounting in the United States when the two men met at a country club in 1982 to discuss the small-car idea. (Toyota had earlier tried unsuccessfully to persuade Ford to participate in a joint-production plan.) G.M. and Toyota eventually settled on a G.M. plant in Fremont, Calif., using Toyota’s production methods to build small vehicles for each company. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01smith.html?register=facebook 3/7 12/4/2018 Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies - The New York Times Mr. Smith did not stop there. He built half a dozen new factories in North America and started the Saturn Corporation, which was meant to be a “clean sheet of paper” approach to producing and selling automobiles, particularly small cars, to compete with Japanese models. The Saturn announcement came as the industry was climbing out of a recession, and competition for the site of its factory was fierce. Governors, mayors and civic officials from around the United States poured into Mr. Smith’s office on the 14th floor of the G.M. Building in Detroit, offering the company millions of dollars in incentives to land the plant. In the end, Mr. Smith chose Spring Hill, Tenn., about 35 miles south of Nashville, not far from the Tennessee plant built by the Nissan Motor Corporation. The Saturn plant officially opened the day before he retired in July 1990, rolling the first of its plastic-sided cars off the assembly line as he looked on. Even though he promoted labor-management cooperation at Saturn, Mr. Smith became a target for the United Automobile Workers union. It struck G.M. several times during his tenure, notably in 1984, shutting the company for several weeks. He angered working-class Detroit residents by building a factory in a traditionally Polish neighborhood, nicknamed Poletown. Though the struggling city welcomed the project, dozens of homes had to be demolished and hundreds of people relocated. While Mr. Smith was building new factories, G.M. was cutting jobs at older ones, as in Flint, Mich., Mr. Moore’s hometown. In “Roger & Me,” Mr. Moore vividly depicted the decline in Flint, where one of every two residents had once worked for the company. The film chronicled an often-humorous effort by Mr. Moore to track down Mr. Smith to challenge him over Flint’s demise. In fact, Mr. Smith was an accessible executive, regularly sitting for interviews and occasionally ferrying journalists back to their offices in his chauffeur-driven Cadillac. (Yesterday, Mr. Moore’s Web site posted a picture of Mr. Smith framed in black.) https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01smith.html?register=facebook 4/7 12/4/2018 Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies - The New York Times His candor raised the hackles of union leaders, including Mr. Fraser, the U.A.W.’s president at the time. After Mr. Smith threatened to shut plants during sensitive negotiations in 1982, Mr. Fraser vowed to find “a zipper for Roger Smith’s lips.” Mr. Smith also clashed with E.D.S.’s founder, H. Ross Perot, whom he put on the G.M. board after purchasing his company. Mr. Perot began criticizing G.M. as intransigent, infuriating Mr. Smith, who sought his ouster. Mr. Perot eventually left, with a $700 million buyout that barred him from discussing G.M. Mr. Smith is survived by his wife of 53 years, Barbara; two sons, Roger B. Smith and Drew J. Smith; two daughters, Jennifer A. Ponski and Victoria B. Sawula; and six grandchildren. Despite the many controversies in his career, Mr. Smith said time would bear out the wisdom of his decisions. “I don’t expect them to build a big stone monument to me; that’s not my goal in life,” he said in the 1995 interview. “I’d like to think that if I did anything extraordinary, it was the work that we did in getting the corporation ready for the 21st century.” But General Motors continued to decline after he left. It has since spun off E.D.S. and Hughes Electronics, Mr. Smith’s two major acquisitions, and it was passed temporarily by Toyota this year as the world’s biggest car company; G.M.

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