Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

---

Whitacre as CEO Could Rescue GM
Posted at 7:41 a.m. EST, Dec. 3, 2009

Did you ever speak to Ed Whitacre when he was running Southwestern Bell? When he took that broken-up piece of Ma Bell and decided, single-handedly, that he was going to build it into a great national company with low costs and a motivated, lean management, and he wasn't going to let the unions stop him?

I did.

He was the best.

He was fierce and proud and was going to do whatever was necessary to rebuild the greatness of this once amazing company.

Now, I will admit that the headwinds for telcos have been out of control as their whole business of landlines seems to disappear by the day. But Whitacre made a ton of acquisitions -- admittedly overpaying for some of them -- and turned his company into arguably the best telco player in the country if not the world. It has been a serial provider of dividends and a serial innovator.

I bring all of this up for one reason. When he got the GM job, the first thing I thought of was, the unions had better watch themselves. This guy's no figurehead -- he's going to take it to them. Factory guys had better watch out; he will not tolerate putting out anything but the best cars. Senior management, you'd better watch out, he doesn't need you. He likes to run the place with a shoestring administration.

You never heard much about him when he came in, some old guy from a phone company. He was anything but.

Privately, I always regarded Whitacre as an assassin of the bad. The most no-nonsense major executive in this country.

I hope he picks himself as CEO as he surely dumped Fritz on Tuesday. Two things Whitacre knows how to deal with will lose a ton of power if he does: the federal government and the unions.

And that means if GM were to do an equity offering today with Whitacre as chairman, as much as I hated the company, I would recommend that you buy buy buy on the deal.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions on the stocks mentioned.

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints