More senior GM executives are expected to depart.

The Exodus Has Begun.

General Motors’ parts purchasing chief, Bo Andersson, has announced he’s leaving the bankrupt automaker to “pursue other career opportunities,” words that, in corporate-speak, usual mean someone has been pushed out of the airplane, with or without a golden parachute.

“Bo has made tremendous contributions to the development of our global purchasing and supply chain strategy as we’ve globalized our product line portfolios and manufacturing footprint,” said GM CEO Fritz Henderson, of the 53-year-old Andersson, who joined the automaker through its Swedish Saab subsidiary, in 1987.

Henderson has also noted, in recent days, that he is working up a list of management changes he hopes to implement, in the weeks to come, as General Motors works its way through the bankruptcy courts, where it tossed its fate on June 1st.

One of the most significant personnel changes was announced on June 9th, when Edward Whitacre, Jr. signed on as the troubled maker’s new chairman, replacing Ken Kresa, the board member who’d been holding that position on an interim basis since the firing of Rick Wagoner by the White House, in late March. Kresa had made it clear he was not seeking to stay in the chairman’s post.

There is expected to be a wholesale housecleaning among the board of directors when the “new” GM emerges from Chapter 11, optimistically within 60 to 90 days of its filing. The White House has made no secret that it is playing an active role in the search for replacement directors, even though President Obama maintains the position that his administration will not be playing an active role in day-to-day GM management since that’s what the new directors will do.

While there’s been a significant groundswell of opposition to the government taking a more than 60% stake in the post-bankruptcy General Motors, there will be few who will miss what has traditionally been see as an overly-compliant board, once called “pet rocks” by a frustrated Ross Perot. 

“Rick had to go because he was too much of the gradualist,” unwilling to speed up change, and also constitutionally opposed to the idea of a bankruptcy, insists a high-level company source, who adds that, “the board needs to go because they’re simply unwilling to rock the boat, no matter how much that’s needed.”

Still more senior GM executives are expected either to be given the heave-ho, or to make a run for the door on their own, by the time the automaker is restructured through what is known as a “363 Sale.”  This particularly bankruptcy process will allow the GM to dump its bad assets in old GM, and then sell the good bits, essentially to a new legal version of itself, as it emerges as a smaller, nimbler manufacturer.  With just four divisions, rather than eight, there will be less of a need to maintain the bloated bureaucracy that dominated the company in its final, failing years.

Perhaps the biggest question unanswered concerns the fate of Fritz Henderson.  The executive traveled a similar course as his one-time mentor, Rick Wagoner, including his educational path and his start at the New York offices of the GM Treasurer.  But Henderson curried favor with the White House, in the run-up to Wagoner’s ouster, by being more willing to consider the long-proscribed bankruptcy option. Henderson was in charge of the “viability plan” that  the White House said wasn’t viable.

From the President down to the working members of the White House Automotive Task Force, there’s been nothing but public praise for Henderson, but in both political and business circles, that is no guarantor of longevity. Firing Henderson at the  same time as Wagoner might have thrown GM into more chaos with no new leadership in place. That is now changing.  

“The real question,” posed the company source, “is how well Fritz gets along with Whitacre.”  The new GM chairman is an automotive outsider – he is a telecommunications industry veteran who, as head of SBC, directed the merger with AT&T – and, on the plus side, could use someone with the skills and understanding of the car business.  But Whitacre is said to be blunt and laser-focused, and if he doesn’t develop a positive working relationship with Henderson, insiders believe he could seek the CEO’s rapid exit.