One of the themes that came up while I was profiling White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.” 

It looks like there might be something to my initial hunch that GM CEO Fritz Henderson was ousted because the company is now stable enough to make a change it's board has wanted to make for a while. Today's Times story explores that angle a bit, in any case:

It looks like Fritz Henderson, who only took over as GM's CEO back in March, has been forced out by the company's board. From the Times:

General Motors said Tuesday that its chief executive, Fritz Henderson, was resigning and would be succeeded on an interim basis by the automaker’s new chairman, Edward E. Whitacre Jr. ...

Mr. Henderson became chief of G.M. after the previous chief executive, Rick Wagoner, was asked to resign in March by President Obama’s auto task force. But in a sign that the company’s board is dissatisfied with G.M.’s progress, Mr. Whitacre, the retired head of AT&T, will assume the top job on a temporary basis.

“We all agreed that some changes needed to be made going forward,” Mr. Whitacre said.

It's obviously a little early to draw conclusions about what happened. But my first impression is that this could be a signal of relative strength. When the Obama auto task force fired Wagoner, it seemed to want to replace him with an outsider capable of shaking up the company's staid culture. But the task force worried about putting the company through such a radical change during a period that was already so wrenching, and so it settled for Henderson. At least that's the impression you get from former auto czar Steve Rattner's account in Fortune last month. And from this excellent narrative of the GM bailout in the Times back in July. The Times piece actually had a great nugget highlighting the cultural problem Henderson posed:

If you've been following the trials of the auto industry this last year, then you already know GM's management team, led by former CEO Rick Wagoner, left a lot to be desired. But, even so, Wagoner comes off as unbelievably lame in Steve Rattner's account of his time as Obama's auto guru. To wit:

At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

In my relatively few interactions with chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, I found him to be likable, dedicated, and generally knowledgeable. But Rick set a tone of "friendly arrogance" that seemed to permeate the organization.

Certainly Rick and his team seemed to believe that virtually all of their problems could be laid at the feet of some combination of the financial crisis, oil prices, the yen-dollar exchange rate, and the UAW. ...

As we continued our rather awkward conversation [about his ouster], Rick suddenly asked, "Are you going to fire Ron Gettelfinger too?" Startled by the reference to the UAW head, I replied, "I'm not in charge of firing Ron Gettelfinger," and Rick soon left to brief his board on our decision.

How bout a little personal responsibility? After all, as Rattner notes, "any management team that had burned through $21 billion of cash in a year and another $13 billion in the first quarter of 2009 could not be allowed to continue." 

The question is whether Wagoner's successor, Fritz Henderson, is really up to the job of changing GM's culture. He was, of course, part of the same management team that made a habit of shuttling directly from the executive suite to the garage and back. (No word on whether or not that's changed.) Also, you get the impression from Rattner's account and others that the auto task force would have liked to hire an outsider, but thought there was a limit to the amount of change the company could withstand. My favorite indicator that Henderson was far from the ideal choice comes from this Times piece: