CEO Series: Mary Barra of General Motors on Committing to an Eco-Friendly Future | HBR IdeaCast

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**Alison Beard** (1:07)
Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.
On this show for nearly 800 episodes now, we've aimed to bring you the most cutting edge ideas in business management and leadership in ways you can understand them. And while we gain so much insight from researchers and academics, those who study business, we also learn a whole lot from practitioners, the people in the trenches building and running companies. This month, we wanted to bring you a series of interviews with some of the world's leading current and former CEOs to hear their perspectives and their most important challenges and aspirations. Look for a new special episode of this IdeaCast CEO series dropping in your feed each Thursday in May.
To start, we'll hear from Mary Barra, the CEO of Automaker General Motors. We invited her to our recent virtual conference, HBR Live, Leaders Who Make a Difference, to talk about her commitment to a future full of electric vehicles. She was interviewed by Amy Bernstein, the editor of our magazine. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

**Amy Bernstein** (2:28)
Hello, I'm Amy Bernstein, and I'm the editor of Harvard Business Review. I'm thrilled to be here today with Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors. Mary rose through the ranks of GM to become its CEO in 2014, and its chairman in 2016
The first female CEO of a major automaker, she previously served as the executive vice president of global product development, purchasing and supply chain at General Motors. Mary has long spoken of an all electric future for GM. And in January, she made the kind of startling announcement that GM would completely phase out vehicles using internal combustion engines by 2035, and will also go completely carbon neutral at all facilities worldwide, also by 2035 I want to get into that with you today, Mary.
How are you going to go all electric in just 14 years? Talk us through that.

**Mary Barra** (3:35)
Well, we already have a lot of learnings from an EV future perspective with the Chevrolet Bolt EV and now the Chevrolet Bolt EUV.
And we've announced that we're going to be, we're investing $27 billion between now and 2025 to have 30 EV models globally, and about two-thirds of those in the United States. And so when we look at projecting the future, that's what allowed us to say, that's our aspiration to have all of our light duty vehicles be all electric by 2035, the vehicles that we're selling. There's much that needs to happen, but we have to set ambitious goals because we believe in science, we believe that we need to do the right thing for the environment. And we believe now we have the technology and with the platform we've developed that we can talk more about. We can have a full range of vehicles so everyone has access to an EV.
And we can do it in a way where customers are excited about moving to EVs because some of the issues that they worry about, whether it's range, whether it's charging, whether it's having the right functionality of the vehicle, those are all things we're very confident that either on our own, at the right vehicle or working with many others, including the federal government on the appropriate EV charging infrastructure. Those are all things that we can accomplish in that period of time.

**Amy Bernstein** (4:53)
This is a big, hairy, audacious goal.

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