This is the single greatest honor in the motor vehicle industry, intended to honor a career and/or lifetime achievement. To become a "Hall of Famer" the nominee must be either retired or deceased. Recipients must have significantly impacted the development of the automobile or the motor vehicle industry. Typically, four to eight individuals are inducted each year.
John F. “Jack” Smith Jr. reached the top of the world’s largest company, and he did it the old fashioned way: hard work, always keeping his eye on the task in front of him, and climbing the corporate ladder rung by rung.
In January 1996, Jack Smith was elected chairman of General Motors Corporation, after having served as the company’s president and CEO since 1992.
“I wasn’t looking for the job, that’s for sure,” Smith was once quoted as saying. Yet, it was a job he was destined for.
Smith joined General Motors in 1961 as a payroll auditor at the Fisher Body plant in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was a great job, he thought, and not far from his hometown of Worcester. His hard work and no-nonsense approach to his assignments got him noticed, and GM soon had plans to put Jack to work in places other than Massachusetts.
Former GM Chairman Roger Smith, who in the 1960s was General Motors’ assistant treasurer working in New York, took notice of the younger Smith and invited him to come work in the Big Apple. Jack Smith refused. “I’d heard great things about him,” Roger Smith once said, “and tried to get him to come to New York. He turned me down, so I had to go up to Framingham myself to talk him into it!”
That was 1966. By 1974, Jack Smith had taken over Roger Smith’s job as assistant treasurer.
As assistant treasurer, Jack Smith was no longer an anonymous figure at General Motors. More accurately, he was now under the white light of corporate visibility, and his work got him steadily promoted to positions of even greater responsibility.
Assistant comptroller in 1976. Comptroller in 1980. Director of worldwide product planning in 1982. President of General Motors -Canada in 1984. President of General Motors - Europe in 1987.While director of worldwide planning in 1982, Smith was GM’s lead negotiator with Toyota that resulted in the revolutionary 50/50 GM/Toyota joint venture called New United Motor Manufacturing, located in Fremont, California.
In 1990, Jack Smith was named vice chairman and was elected GM’s president in 1992. Smith, however, immediately found himself in the middle of the biggest challenge of his career. GM had suffered record financial losses in the early 1990s, and corporate profitability was nowhere in sight. The future of the company was in doubt.
Clearly alarmed, GM’s board of directors took matters into their own hands, naming John G. Smale, an outside director from Proctor & Gamble Co., as non-executive chairman. The board’s next move was to once again tap Jack Smith, its rising star, as chief executive officer.
Smith’s daunting task: to restructure a company that was essentially running the same as when Alfred P. Sloan organized it 70 years before. Smith had to make General Motors faster, leaner and more human. He had to break down the walls of long-entrenched bureaucracy. He had to bring products to the marketplace faster and of higher quality. He had to re-build relationships with labor, suppliers and dealers. And time was of the essence.
Smith immediately streamlined and consolidated operating divisions and duplicative engineering centers. He was a pioneer in investing in the Asia/Pacific region, particularly China, a move that has General Motors in a leadership position today. In 1993, just a year after its financial crisis, the company turned a profit of $2.5 billion. In 1994, the company earned $4.9 billion and was clearly on its way back. Jack Smith had righted the ship.
Smith retired from General Motors in 2003. He accepts his role as GM’s savior the same way he accepted the top job in the first place – reluctantly. In a matter of a few years, he made General Motors a leaner, more profitable company, doing what so many said couldn’t be done – making the elephant dance. And along the way he respected – and was respected by – employees, dealers, suppliers, labor, governments and competitors alike.
