She started on the factory floor. Mary Barra spent a career at General Motors moving through engineering and manufacturing before becoming its chief executive in 2014 — the first woman to run a major global carmaker anywhere.
A serious safety crisis landed almost immediately. Recalls followed, and then something harder: a change in how the company handled accountability internally, which is the part that does not show up in a quarterly report.
Turning an industrial supertanker toward electrification is less a decision than a decade-long act of will.
Then she committed GM to going all-electric, with heavy investment in vehicles, batteries and software. Legacy automakers are all running the same race against rivals who never had petrol engines to unwind in the first place.
The scale of that is difficult to overstate. Supply chains, factories and business models have to be rebuilt at the same time, while the existing business keeps funding it. Whether a century-old industrial giant can remake itself this thoroughly is still an open question, and she is the one answering it.