'You'd better return that call'.

• Author: Kristie, James
• Position: THOUGHT LEADERSHIP - Reprint

From Road to Power by Laura Colby. Copyright [c] 2015 by the author. Published by Bloomberg Press, a Wiley imprint (www.wiley. com/go/bloombergpress).

One morning in 1997, Mary Barra got an odd telephone message--the chief executive of General Motors, Jack Smith, wanted to interview her for a position as his assistant. "I thought it was a joke," recalls Barra. She didn't reply to the message, and left the light blinking on her answering machine. Later in the day, she called her boss, Ken Varisco, over and played it for him. Come on, she asked him, who is trying to trick me?

He looked sheepish and apologized. "I didn't get a chance to talk to you about this yet," he said. "You'd better return that call." Barra had returned to GM from Stanford to a job that was less than her dream role, as a senior staff engineer in operations services for what was then the Chevy-Pontiac-Canada group...