GM's 'Future Leaders': Maryann Combs
By Michelle Krebs September 17, 2008By Dale Buss
Maryann Combs still remembers vividly her first assignment for General Motors: bolting generators to engine blocks on the Pontiac, Mich., truck-assembly line, as part of her internship while attending General Motors Institute.
"For a teenaged female right out of high school, it was an eye-opening experience," recalled Combs, who now is president of GM's Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center in Shanghai.
Beyond awakening, Combs found the experience transforming.
"It really marked my career as an engineer because I got a solid foundation as well as a belief from that experience that engineers really have to know the manufacturing environment, or design is not a success," said the 44-year-old Combs. "It made me a better engineer."
Nowadays, Combs is responsible for helping make better engineers out of about 1,500 employees of PATAC, and in turn helping them contribute to Chevrolet and Buick products that are sold by Shanghai GM and GM's joint venture in China.
"Our portfolio of products has grown up," Combs said. "Our biggest challenge is to meet ever-changing market needs in China. Another key challenge, to keep growing, is to retain the talent we have and attract new top talent - even as there's much more automotive competition now for those people."
And as GM has intensified its efforts to integrate product design and engineering globally, so has its efforts to wrap PATAC into the worldwide matrix.
"There's been increased focus on China in the last few months from GM's top leadership," she said. "They're helping us grow our capabilities in China so that we can work with other global engineering centers."
Both Sides of the Line
Combs described herself as "both a "car person" and an "engineering person." The Detroit-born kid had a vast collection of all sorts of model vehicles and became enamored of the idea of "creating something that you then see going down the road," she said. "And many people's lives are affected by what you do."
After graduating from GM Institute (now Kettering University) in nearby Flint, Mich., and getting her master's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University, Combs spent a decade proceeding through a variety of positions and parts of the vehicle, starting with instrument clusters.
By the early Nineties, she had moved into product engineering in diverse areas of vehicles, ranging from interiors to climate systems. She rose to director of engineering the guts for the 1999 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup-truck program.
Right after that, she began further application of lessons she had learned at the Pontiac truck plant about how to fuse designing and building vehicles, as the executive responsible for all general-assembly manufacturing engineering for GM's North American truck plants.
After a diversion to participate in the Sloan Fellows program at MIT and pick up an MBA, she led engineering and product-planning teams at GM of Canada and built up the engineering center there for four years, until 2005. Combs returned to the United States as executive director of North American electrical engineering, helping GM deal with development and integration of the company's growing offering of telematics and "infotainment" systems.
China Market
Combs got a taste of the growing importance of Chinese engineering to other parts of the company before arriving in Shanghai in the summer of 2007. GM's China team had helped with some exterior engineering of the Chevrolet Equinox, development of which was led by GM of Canada. "I started learning about the China team and how they worked globally," Combs said.
Not only is the operation Combs now runs, PATAC, increasingly important to GM, but it also is an enterprise dear to the Chinese government, considering that the company has a 50-50 joint venture with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Group.
"The advantage we have through that is that of being a 'local' company," Combs said. "Our employees have been born in this country and have grown up here. They know the heritage and the cultural uniqueness of China and they're able to express it in the designs they do for the marketplace.
"At the same time, being fully integrated with GM's global system, we can offer them the opportunity to work with Europe, North America an Australia - to collaborate on a much larger scale. So they're helping their home country and culture and at the same time getting broad exposure that no one else can offer."
Adding Design
But now that she's reached a point in her career where she can make best use of her long-ago epiphany about the importance of integrating engineering and manufacturing, Combs is having to add a third element to her holistic viewpoint - and to her supervisory responsibilities: design.
GM is rapidly beefing up its commitment to Chinese design not only for the domestic market but also for markets abroad, such as the heavy responsibilities that a Chinese team had for the styling of the new Buick Riviera concept vehicle. And they're creating more space for designers at PATAC.
"I didn't have design [oversight] in Canada," she said, so the change takes quite some adjustments on her part. "You have to respect that creative styling is different than the engineering talent," Combs explained, including their vastly different work styles. "Engineers need to sit next to each other and talk and collaborate; design people require more open, quiet space.'
Maryann Combs
Title: President, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center
Location: Shanghai
Age: 44
Born: United States
Personal: Married with two young children.
Spare-time pursuits: "Whenever I'm not working, I'm with my family. You can only experience your kids' growth and evolution once." And the occasional round of golf.
Business heroes: A roster of people at GM who "shared advice and guidance" with her over the years, "helping me learn that I could do more than I originally thought I could."
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