GM’s newest board member, UCLA Psychology faculty member Cynthia Telles, and her husband, former California Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, addressing the 2000 Democratic convention. Telles has served on the boards of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad (where she served with GM Chairman/CEO Ed Whitacre), as well as several banks. She has no Auto Industry experience, but at least she knows Ed Whitacre and has strong ties to the Democratic party. Or, as Ed Whitacre puts it in GM’s official release:
The addition of Dr. Telles to GM’s board of directors ensures that the company will continue to benefit from a diversity of perspectives and experience in our mission to provide consumers with the world’s best vehicles
Kaiser delivers by far the best bang-for-the-buck health care in the US. If only GM could do the same!
Definitely some relevance there, given GM’s (domestic) legacy health care costs relative to the international industry.
Maybe she can determine how and where the psychotropics are introduced into the environment.
Or, in today’s world of incestuous boards, “The addition of Dr. Telles to the board of directors ensure that I continue to benefit, because a diversity of perspectives is not in my best interest. We will missionary our consumers until they say we provide the world’s best vehicles. Or until I find a way to get paid large. Really large.”
I’m undecided … could she possibly be worse than the Rick Wagoneer (sic) board was?
(Off the top of my head) Waggoner had operatives from the democratic party (Erskine Bowles) and republican (don’t remember who), failed CEO’s (Percy Barnevik of ABB, and another I don’t remember), and then others that were put there for window dressing and to send a social message, rather than to provide competence-based oversight of the strategic and operative management of the company…
BTW, did anybody hear if upon leaving the company and giving-up that nice CEO paycheck, whether Waggoner was able to continue to pay for his child’s university education? (Recall, he was concerned that this might be an issue, and was what he cited as his reason for not wanting to reduce his salary to the 1$/yr level.) ;O)
So a GM board position becomes as pay-off for connected partisans moving through the revolving doors, DC-GM-DC.
Possible GM slogan: Government Motors, Because We’re All in this Together, Community Owned for the Benefit of Our Community.
“It takes a village to bail out a failed automaker.”
The addition of Dr. Telles to GM’s board of directors ensures that the company will continue to benefit from a diversity of perspectives and experience in our mission to provide consumers with the world’s best vehicles.
This means Dr. Telles believes the same crap as we do, but looks different from us. This is what some people now consider “diversity”.
“Telles has served on the boards of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad”. She has board experience at major companies, including finance, operations and benefits (all things that GM has to be worried about) and being politically connected isn’t a bad thing. I know all things hate GM (and I share alot of them) but I would say this is a good thing.
Wow, even 10 years ago Democrats were openly admitting they want America to comply with the China Compulsory Certification.
No offense to Dr. Teller personally, but she seems to have no qualification to sit on the board of a company like GM. So she did sit on other boards. What qualifications got her those board seats? She is a psychology professor, for God’s sake.
It’s the snowball effect. Once board appointment creates the qualification to get another board assignment and so on.
Exactly. BoDs are very clubby affairs.
There was a point where they existed for oversight, but now they are merely cogs in the machine.
If you get really bored someday, check out the spiderweb of interconnection among Boards of the Fortune 500.
Surely nobody is really surprised that Obama is politicising GM? Some may be happy and some annoyed – but nobody should be surprised.
“…diversity of perspectives and experience in our mission to provide consumers with the world’s best vehicles’
Translation: She flunked basic calculus at college and then majored in psychology. She can do no creative work, but we needed her to complete our obligations to the most inept administration in US history. We are seriously thinking of hiring our second engineer early next year.
Sure – Obama personally selected her, and now she spends every weekend at the white house briefing him on their plan to turn all the cars and guns in America into sculptures of chairman Mao! I guess that is still better than letting GM fail and risk dragging the whole country into a depression.
Frankly, I would rather see someone with a PHD in physiology at GM than another MBA whose only real training is in meeting planning and career path management.