Biography | Mary Barra — The Riverfront Towers Where the Board Made Her Chief Executive

People treat a Detroit CEO handover as a Cobo Hall keynote with a concept car behind the speaker.

This one was a board vote and a press statement.

On 10 December 2013 General Motors announced that Daniel Akerson would step down as chairman and chief executive on 15 January 2014.

The board elected Mary Barra, then executive vice president for global product development, purchasing and supply chain, as the next chief executive.

She would also join the board.

She took the job on 15 January 2014.

BBC, the company's own notice, and later congressional biography pages all date the start that Wednesday.

She was the first woman to run a global automaker.

The pin is the Renaissance Center on the Detroit riverfront, the headquarters GM bought from Ford in 1996 and still lists as 300 Renaissance Center.

John Portman's towers had already been the company letterhead for seventeen years when the vote landed.

The public Wintergarden faces the river.

The complex is a working headquarters with a hotel and shops, not a private floor.

Akerson pulled the succession forward after his wife was diagnosed with cancer.

The Treasury had sold the last of the federal stake in the company the day before the announcement.

Barra had been inside GM since the 1980 co-op year in Pontiac.

Product development, not finance, was the path that reached this building.

The first year in the job was also the year of the ignition-switch recalls.

That hearing belongs on a separate pin.

This one marks the dated board election and the published start date.

Barra is a living executive.

The memory does not mark a daily office routine or a private house in the suburbs.

Photo: GM headquarters towers on the Detroit riverfront, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Mary Barra, 13 August 2014, U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.