Roger Smith (executive)

Roger Bonham Smith ( born July 12, 1925 in Columbus, Ohio, † November 29, 2007 in Detroit ) was an American manager and CEO of General Motors (GM).

Career

After attending high school in Detroit Smith studied business administration at the University of Michigan and graduated with a MBA from. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy, after which he began his career at GM and made there career.

Smith became CEO of GM in 1981 and modernized in the group with a series of measures. Although this restructuring could not all win back the lost market share, but they at least helped to find again the connection to the leader of the world market.

So he invested in so-called "new technologies ", by which time especially robotics and information and communication technologies have been understood. He bought it at Hughes Electronics and Electronic Data Systems (EDS ) and built the first fully automated car factory for the Saturn project.

With Toyota, it agreed a joint venture company to also manufacture small cars in California can.

In the late 1980s he moved several GM plants, including the Flint (Michigan), from the U.S. in order to produce more cheaply in Mexico can. That is what Michael Moore's film Roger & Me, in which Smith was portrayed as the epitome of the industrial decline of the United States.