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Good morning.
Running a car company isn’t easy, even in the best of times. And Mary Barra’s reign as General Motors’ CEO has been anything but the best of times. She became the first female CEO of an automobile company in 2014, taking the job amidst a massive controversy over faulty ignition switches. In her first year, she had to issue 84 recall notices and testify before the U.S. Senate. Last year, she was faced with the worst auto workers strike in a half century. And then came COVID-19, followed by the upheaval over the George Floyd killing. Oh yes, and then there are the repeated Twitter attacks from the President of the United States.
Throughout it all, Barra has remained unflappable, eschewing the industry’s traditional defensiveness, and always asking: “What can we learn from this?” That’s why Fortune’s Ellen McGirt and I were happy to welcome her as a guest on this week’s edition of our podcast, Leadership Next. She represents a new style of leading.
Ellen started by asking Barra about her strong public statement over the George Floyd killing, in which she said she was “impatient” and “disgusted”–words that emanated from the heart, not the marketing department. “I personally felt very sad,” Barra told us. “I am an action-oriented person. I’m an engineer. And I asked, ‘Why is this happening over and over?’” She felt a need for action. “I knew we can do more, and we needed to do more, with a sense of urgency.”
In response, Barra has not only created an “inclusion advisory board” to guide GM’s actions, but also signed up for the Business Roundtable’s Special Committee for Racial Equality and Justice. Barra was one of the CEOs who pushed the Business Roundtable last year to adopt a new statement of corporate purpose, focusing on multiple stakeholders and not just shareholders. “The statement was catching up with reality,” she says.
Incidentally, Barra believes the COVID-19 lockdown has strengthened the case for electric vehicles. People are skeptical of mass transit and want their own cars. And improvements in the environment over recent months have reinforced the need for those vehicles to be clean. ”We believe in an all-electric future,” she said, and have “accelerated our work from an EV perspective.”
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
U.S. competitiveness
The U.S. has for the first time in over three decades dropped out of the top five of the world's most competitive economies, according to rankings compiled by the IMD business school in Switzerland. Two years ago it was at #1; now it's at #10. Why? The drop is largely due to President Trump's trade policies, which have made the U.S. economy less open while also massively increasing public expenditure, thanks to things like the agriculture bailout necessitated by the trade war with China. Fortune
LGBTQ rights
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that American employers can't fire people just because they are gay or transgender. As Fortune's Sy Mukherjee explains, this comes just days after the Trump administration moved to allow health insurers to discriminate against people on the basis of gender identity—and the ruling could stymie that move, because it makes clear that discriminating against someone because they are gay or trans necessarily means discriminating against that person on the basis of sex, which is illegal. Fortune
Fed protection
Equities rose in the U.S. yesterday after the Federal Reserve said it would buy individual corporate bonds, and on the back of a report saying the Trump administration is preparing a $1 trillion infrastructure move. Asian markets then picked up the baton, with the Nikkei 225 rising 4.9% and the Hang Seng 2.4%. Europe also saw a positive start to the day, with the Stoxx 600 up 2.5% on opening. U.S. futures look solid. Fortune
Midea founder
He Xiangjian, the 77-year-old founder of Chinese home appliance giant Midea, was reportedly held hostage with his family for hours on Sunday in the city of Foshan. The police were alerted by He's son, who swam across a river to get help. Five people were arrested and no-one was hurt, police said. CNN
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Beijing outbreak
The latest coronavirus outbreak in Beijing is looking increasingly serious, with parts of the city being fenced off and close contacts of infected people being prevented from leaving. Sports and entertainment venues have also been closed. Scientists fear that this is a more contagious strain of the virus than the one that appeared in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic. Guardian
Hydroxy rejection
The Food and Drug Administration has withdrawn its emergency-use authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drugs that President Trump and others have been claiming are useful in the treatment of COVID-19—with Trump going so far as to take hydroxychloroquine himself. The FDA now says it is "no longer reasonable to believe that... the known and
potential benefits of these products outweigh their known and potential risks." Washington Post
CureVac stake
Remember CureVac, the German biotech firm to whose candidate COVID-19 vaccine the Trump administration reportedly wanted exclusive access? The company has now sold a 23% stake to the German government, in exchange for $340 million that will be used to further develop its pipeline and technology. Human clinical trials of the prospective vaccine will begin this month. Politico
Contact tracing
The German government has released its contact-tracing app, which was developed by Deutsche Telekom and SAP. Privacy and technology experts seem to like its decentralized, privacy-preserving nature—the Chaos Computer Club, the world's oldest benevolent-hacker group, has declined to criticize it, which is as good as it gets with the CCC. Here's an explainer about how it works. TheLocal.de
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
