Although Morgan Stanley Dean Witter managing director Stephen J. Girsky doesn’t have much good to say about General Motors Corp.’s bleak Wall Street outlook, he can’t help but be impressed by the No.1 automaker’s recent personnel changes.
“On paper, GM’s starting to look like the Yankees,” Mr. Girsky says, of the appointment of former Chrysler Corp. product chief Bob Lutz to vice chairman in charge of product development. “Frankly, I’m very excited about it.”
Although he says he’d rather have Ford Motor Co.’s product lineup of Premier Automotive Group head Wolfgang Reitzle, product development chief Richard Parry-Jones and design guru J Mays leading the product team than just one Bob Lutz, he acknowledges that the new hire is bound to help the moribund GM.
Combined with the recent appointment of John M. Devine to the chief financial officer spot, and G. Richard Wagoner Jr. as chief executive, GM now has “three powerful people from very different cultures.”
He adds, however, that despite how things look on paper, he’s waiting for the execution. o
