The scandal over General Motors' unconscionable delay in fixing a dangerous defect represents a golden opportunity for new chief Mary Barra. She can put her own stamp on the resurrected company, show that its secretive, bad-news-fearing corporate culture is changing, and that it is committed to building products that meet the highest standards of safety, performance and reliability. And when GM doesn't meet those standards, that it will respond with alacrity and hold itself accountable.
So far, Ms. Barra is doing and saying all the politic things, as she leafs through the crisis management playbook in a valiant effort to limit the widening damage to GM's reputation and the potential for millions of dollars in government fines. With an appropriate tone of humility, she has vowed to get to the bottom of what happened and why it took so many years for GM to come clean, even as public complaints mounted and fatal accidents occurred. Ms. Barra has assigned that task to a former U.S. prosecutor.
She has also hired a well-known litigator, Kenneth Feinberg, who has handled some of the leading victim compensation cases in the U.S., including the Boston Marathon bombing. His job will essentially be to advise GM on how much it can expect to fork out in damages to the families of the 13 people killed and others injured in accidents where faulty ignition switches appear to have caused motors to shut off, disabling the car's air bags and stalling engines.
Ms. Barra apologized personally to the families and repeated that public apology Tuesday in an appearance before a congressional committee investigating the scandal and the failure of government watchdogs to flag the problem.
She told lawmakers that "whatever mistakes were made in the past, we will not shirk from our responsibilities now and in the future. Today's GM will do the right thing."
But the salvaging job won't be easy, and as more of this mess comes to light, it's increasingly clear just how deep GM's cultural problem runs.
The day before her Washington appearance, GM added yet another major recall related to a potential power-steering flaw in 1.3 million small and mid-size cars built between 2004 and 2010. That brings the total number of GM vehicles recalled since February to more than 6.3 million. The company has had to double its first-quarter provision for recall costs to a whopping $750-million (U.S.).
Ms. Barra sounds eager to restore broken public trust and eliminate the company's ingrained tendency to avoid taking bad news up the corporate food chain. She has sped up safety reviews, created a global vehicle safety post – a rarity in the industry – and assigned a respected senior engineering executive to the task. He will keep her, other senior executives and the board in the loop, making it impossible for bosses to claim in some future case that they just didn't know what was happening.
Still, Ms. Barra has left too many questions begging for answers. And when she insists, as she did again in her testimony Tuesday, that she's as in the dark as everyone else about what the internal probe will uncover ("I want to know that as much as you"), it doesn't ring true – unless she has spent years as a senior engineering executive and insider with her head happily buried in the sand. Which, come to think of it, was one of the common survival strategies at the old GM.
Even after its brush with death and government bailout, GM has not moved fast enough to change an arrogant culture. It needs a dramatic makeover. A few nips and tucks just won't do.
Follow Brian Milner on Twitter at @BMilnerGlobe.