Roger Smith (executive)

"The world needs specialists and highly trained people with advanced degrees, no question about it. But the world also needs diversity and versatility. It needs people who know as much about our value system as they do about our solar system system."

"We hope this car will be less labor intensive, less material intensive, less everything intensive than anything we have done before."

"[Roger B. Smith] identified the following skills and mental processes required of today’s managers as those acquired and sharpened in the study of the liberal arts."

"# Individuals are trained to recognize recurring elements and common themes."

"# They are trained to see relationships between things that may seem different."

"# They are trained to combine familiar elements into new forms."

"# They learn to arrange their thoughts in logical order, to write and speak clearly and economically."

"# They learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of confusion."

"# They are accustomed to a relatively unstructured and unsupervised research and discovery process and feel comfortable with nonconformity."

"# They have insight into the fit of form with function."

"# They have learned sideways thinking, the cross classifying habit of mind that comes from learning many different ways to look at things."

"# They have learned to replace confrontation with cooperation and the principles of conflict resolution."

"# They have learned the importance of intellectual integrity, social responsibility, and ethical commitment."

"# They learn that the effective management of change comes from the habit of being receptive to new information, to new paths to traditional goals, even to new goals."

"# They have learned to uncover truths in many forms, and that an answer need not be final."

"# They need to see the worth of the impact of what they do, to understand its place in the larger schemes of things."

"# They learn about the kinds of creativity that leads to visionary solutions"

"I don’t expect them to build a big stone monument to me; that’s not my goal in life. I’d like to think that if I did anything extraordinary, it was the work that we did in getting the corporation ready for the 21st century."

"Liberal Arts may ultimately prove to be the most relevant learning model. People trained in the Liberal Arts learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of apparent confusion. They have the kind of sideways thinking and cross-classifying habit of mind that comes from learning, among other things, the many different ways of looking at literary works, social systems, chemical processes or languages."

"The ultimate impact of the liberal arts on the art of management, then, is a major contribution to the evolution of an ethical and humanistic capitalism -- a system that stimulates innovation, fosters excellence, enriches society, and dignifies work."

"Whether you are carving a statue or reorganizing a corporation, you have a vision of what you want to create, as well as a sense of how to make that vision real by bringing different elements together according to an overall pattern... And just as artists communicate their intent through their works, managers must be able to convey their vision in an inspiring and forceful way - in other words to lead - or else that vision will never be fully realized."

"Roger B. Smith [is] the General Motors executive who tried to modernize the American automotive giant during the 1980s but instead became associated with its decline."

"Roger Smith’s tenure was one of the darkest in General Motors’ history, for customers, workers and for residents of G.M.’s factory towns."