Detroit almost lost General Motors.
Edward Whitacre, who was appointed post-bankruptcy GM chairman by President Obama, and later became CEO, writes in his new book that he arrived in 2009 and quickly cancelled a plan one week before nearly all GM employees were to leave the RenCen and move out to Warren, the Detroit News reports.
In his upcoming memoir "American Turnaround: Reinventing AT&T and GM and The Way We Do Business in the USA," said the plan was to move the staff out there and leave the CEO and a couple other people behind.
"Everybody else — almost 4,000 people, including my entire senior management team — would be a 30-minute drive away in Warren," Whitacre writes, according to the News. He noted that Detroit would have taken "a big economic hit."
After that, GM planned to sell the RenCen, the books says.
