The New Boss: A "Car Guy"

By S.C. GWYNNE

Since entrepreneur and stock-market speculator Billy Durant first cobbled together a venture he called General Motors in 1908, the company has always been ruled by finance men, numbers wizards and balance-sheet fixers. No one was a better example of this than Roger Smith, a diffident financial virtuoso who led the company during the 1980s. But when Smith retired last July after a decade in which GM lost one-fourth of its U.S. market share, mostly because of weak products, GM's board made history by promoting an engineer to the chairman's job.

The fix-it man is Robert Stempel, 57, a 6-ft. 4-in. former college-football tackle with a boombox voice and a down-home manner. Until his ascension to GM president three years ago, he was often seen driving a motorcycle near his home in the sedate suburb of Bloomfield Hills, where he keeps a fleet of old cars he likes to tinker with. His engineering feats have become part of the company lore. In his early career he designed the front-wheel-drive transmission on the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, and in the 1970s he was the leader in one of GM's biggest breakthroughs: the catalytic converter, a revolutionary antipollution device. Stempel has been groomed well for the chairman's post, having served as head of several divisions: Chevrolet, Pontiac, GM's Adam Opel subsidiary in Europe and the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac group. He has never held a job in the finance department.

Stempel's biggest challenge is to shake up a bureaucracy that has stifled innovation. On that count he is amply qualified. His communication skills have been recognized ever since he was first sent on the road in 1966 to persuade skittish dealers of the merits of the front-wheel-drive Toronado. Later he helped defuse a bitter environmental fight at a major new plant site. Associates say he has a photographic memory for both faces and statistics. While Stempel was general manager of Chevrolet in the early 1980s, he gave a detailed presentation of 17 different vehicles, ranging from the subcompact Chevette to medium-duty trucks -- all without referring to notes. "It was an amazing performance," recalls a senior engineer.

The son of a New Jersey banker, Stempel worked summers as a garage mechanic and won a collection of drag-racing trophies. Later he graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, then earned an M.B.A. from Michigan State in 1970. He still reads car-buff magazines, and enjoys skiing and surf casting. Stempel and his wife Pat have three children, two grown and one in college. But Stempel is intensely private about his life outside the company, a feeling that carries over from the kidnapping of his son Timothy in 1975. (His son was rescued from a car trunk, and the kidnappers were caught.)

Stempel's elevation was greeted with cheers among GM workers and dealers, who have wanted a product-oriented chief, a "car guy," for a long time. They have also been heartened by Stempel's declaration that he will run GM as a team leader rather than an autocrat. He promises that the changes he makes will be humane. "We are not going to take GM apart and put it back together again," he said on the day he took over. But he will have trouble resisting the urge to tinker with GM until it roars like the racing machines he loves.