GM: Mary Barra Leading Through Crisis

Mary Barra became GM's CEO in January 2014. Within weeks she inherited an ignition-switch defect the company had known about for years, linked to deaths, and never fixed. She had every conventional option a new CEO reaches for in a crisis: minimize, deflect, let the lawyers run the narrative. She chose a different posture in front of Congress, and not everyone agreed it was enough.

This is a leadership case about the moment a crisis lands on your desk that you did not create but now own. It sharpens the decision between protecting the institution and telling the truth, and what a leader can extract from a disaster beyond just surviving it. How Barra tried to change the culture that produced the failure, and whether that move is repeatable, is the lesson left for inside the app.