cover image Call Me Roger: The Story of How Roger Smith, Chairman of General Motors, Transformed the Industry Leader Into a Fallen Giant

Call Me Roger: The Story of How Roger Smith, Chairman of General Motors, Transformed the Industry Leader Into a Fallen Giant

Albert Lee. McGraw-Hill/Contemporary, $19.95 (324pp) ISBN 978-0-8092-4630-4

A former General Motors executive speech-writer, Lee (Slumlord) presents a shocking view of the once-preeminent automaker's inner workings as Roger Bonham Smith, chairman since 1980, autocratically pursues a 10-year, ""21st Century'' technological master plan that has failed to avert GM's plunge to a third-place market share. Virtually identical vehicles for all brands from Chevrolet to Cadillac were served up for years, the author recalls, as the new Saturn line and other futuristic projects persistently lagged. To stimulate production, and at a price of $2.55 billion, Smith bought H. Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems, meshing the two companies to the point of chaos (staff phone directories updated weekly and robots welding car doors shut), then paid $900 million more to buy out and oust Perot himself. Such actions caused the down-spiraling of morale and productivity of union workers, the need for whose cooperation and compensation Smith failed to graspchoosing instead to please economy-minded shareholders with employee layoffs and plant closings (accompanied by hefty top-management bonuses), according to Lee. As portrayed in this somewhat discursive but penetrating inside story, America's largest industrial hierarchy still has a lot to learn. 150,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; first serial to Playboy. (April)