Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, is at the top of Fortune’s 2025 Most Powerful Women list, released this week. It’s her second year in a row in the top spot, and fifth time overall.
When Geoff Colvin profiled her for Fortune’s 2014 Most Powerful Women issue, Barra had entered the list at No. 2 after just nine months on the job. Colvin looked into her “unexpected opportunity” to transform the company following a recall of a tragically flawed car model. The Chevrolet Cobalt ignition-failure saga had caused 13 known deaths at the time (a later review found that the faulty switch had caused at least 124 deaths and 274 injuries) and ended up costing the company billions.
GM’s initial inaction after learning of the problem, Colvin noted, spoke to a “deeply dysfunctional corporate culture”: Bureaucratic delays meant that it took two and a half years after the problem was known to the company to recall the affected cars.
For Barra, the elevation to CEO at such a precarious moment could have easily become what we now call a “glass cliff”—when a woman is brought in as the head of a flailing company to take the fall—especially at GM, where, as Colvin observed, “trying and failing to change the culture is part of the culture.”
But Barra’s leadership was an immediate departure from the company’s slowpoke approach. Indeed, Colvin noted, despite her being a company lifer whose father also worked at GM, her strategy was “highly un-GM-like. She hasn’t launched a program or put out a 10-point plan; almost incredibly, she hasn’t formed a committee.”
Barra told Colvin the crisis provided an opening for her to shift the corporate culture. “Anytime you want to drive change, you have to have a catalyst for change, and it did provide that,” she noted. “I will also tell you it’s made me more impatient.”
Barra’s impatience paid off. Today she is not only still standing at GM, she’s the fifth-longest-tenured CEO, female or male, on the Fortune 500 list, and one of just six who have lasted more than 10 years.
