It is a truism to say that General Motors’s (GM’s) Ed Welburn, like all the others born in the post-World War II baby boom, grew up in a tumultuous era. And like so many others- he also heard another trusim: That anyone could grow up to be anything, even president of the United States.
But the truth turned out to be more powerful than the truism. And Welburn’s own truth -his ambition and drive – led him to a place no one around him ever expected to see him reach, even to sit down in a car at a car show in Washington and share a joke with the first-ever African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama.
The backdrop is important, for the tumult through which Ed Welburn lived and grew was industrial as well as social, economic and political. Civil rights campaigns and loud protests over discrimination played a huge part. But Welburn’s personal campaign at GM was waged far away from those noisy public battles.
It was powered by several factors: Welburn’s own quiet persistence; his excellence at work no one around him had ever seen a Black man do; and GM’s corporate drive to survive and succeed in a world turned upside down by recessions, oil embargoes, and massive competition from offshore automakers.
Size of the climb
In the beginning, that social backdrop was stunningly disheartening. During Welburn’s childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, African American lives and dreams were so sharply curtailed it took a massive boycott campaign to let Rosa Parks sit where she wanted on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, armed National Guardsmen to open the way for nine Black students to walk to classes at a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and federalized Mississippi National Guardsmen to stop a riot led by a retired Army general and get James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi.
Welburn, undeterred, followed the advice he’d received from GM professionals and enrolled at historically Black Howard University, majoring in fine arts and industrial design. The recession of the late 1950s, bringing with it a flood of European car brands into the American market and the American automakers’ “compact car” answer, was old news by the time Welburn graduated, but the appetite of Americans for smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles had not gone away.
From Howard U. to Harley Earl’s legacy
Welburn graduated in 1972, into his dream job on GM’s Detroit design team, welcomed into the studios with his high “bush” hairstyle by Bill Mitchell, the successor to GM’s first design chief, Harley Earl, whose space age-design Cadillac Cyclone concept car had inspired young Welburn at the Philadelphia International Auto Show so many years earlier.
The OPEC oil embargo burst into the news the very next year, prompted by Persian Gulf producers’ anger over U.S. and its western allies’ support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Americans found themselves struggling to keep their cars’ gas tanks filled, paying high premiums for the gas that was available.
Companies like General Motors found themselves on the wrong end of a consumer trend, as Americans rushed to the showrooms of foreign carmakers selling smaller, more fuel-efficient models. GM and its Detroit competitors, Chrysler and Ford, now were forced to compete with European products that had better gas mileage and Japanese products made under the exacting regimen of statistical process control pioneered by American Edwards Deming, manufactured in plants supplied by “just in time” parts delivery.
A hard learning curve
That double whammy forced massive change in the American auto industry. GM fought back, first experimenting with more fuel-efficient, smaller models of its own. It partnered with Toyota to build the New Motor Manufacturing Initiative in California to learn more about how its Asian competitors were succeeding, and ran a joint manufacturing works for several years. Then it launched Saturn, a new kind of car company with a new way to make cars, learning lessons GM could take into its plants around the United States and elsewhere.
Ed Welburn, its first-ever Black designer, was working at Oldsmobile, a GM company that made bigger cars, but even there, at that time, his drive and his designs won plaudits. His Aerotech concept car and land speed record contender got driven to a world closed-course record 257.123 miles per hour by legendary Indianapolis 500 racer and Can-Am sports car driver A.J. Foyt.
Lessons learned, time to apply them
Welburn joined Saturn for a two-year assignment in 1996, working at its Russelsheim, Germany, design studio. He returned to head GM’s Advanced Design Studio in Warren, Michigan, where he was responsible for innovative vehicle design for all brands. Among other things, he led development of GM’s concept cars, including a new generation of hydrogen-fuel-cell concepts, working at the intersection of cutting-edge engineering and cutting-edge design.
In 2002, Welburn became executive director of body-on-frame architectures, responsible for the three truck studios in the Warren, Michigan, design center.
For perspective, remember that trucks, especially pickups, are the leading models producing profits for the American auto industry. In 2014, for instance, the Chevrolet Silverado, with 437,821 sold going into December, was second only to the Ford F-100 series pickups — 688,810 sold — at the top of the 20 best-selling vehicle models in American sales. Naming an African-American chief of design for those products was not an exercise in public relations. It meant General Motors executives had complete faith in that African American’s abilities and belief in the strength of his talent.
Stepping up to the Big Stage
And the beat went on. In 2003 GM named Welburn vice president, GM Design North America, making him the sixth design leader in the company’s history. Three years later, Welburn stepped up yet again, to his present post as vice president, global design, responsible for design and development of every GM concept and production car in every nation in which GM markets automobiles. He leads some 2,500 design team workers in centers in the U.S., Germany, Korea, China, Australia, Brazil, and India.
Welburn has won wide recognition, including watching his team’s newly redesigned Cadillac ATS win “North American Car of the Year” honors and “Best in Show” honors from Auto Week and the Detroit News for the Chevrolet Corvette, as well as the “Eyes on Design Best Production Vehicle Design” award for the Cadillac ELR.
Note that the Cadillac ATS saw a 755-percent sales growth, year-to-date, in November 2014 compared to 2013. The Cadillac XTS saw 147-percent growth year-over-year, and the Chevrolet Spark saw 219-percent growth.
The Cadillac Elmiraj concept car won critical acclaim at the Annual Concours d’Elegance in Pebble Beach, California, while Welburn stood chatting with film actor Clint Eastwood. Maybe “Dirty Harry” might want to drive that car.
Keeping his course in a rough economy
In 2008, the Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, knocked auto sales almost into the cellar. General Motors and Chrysler executives traveled to Washington to plead for help from the federal government, and many Americans — especially questioners in the U.S. Congress — debated whether the U.S. auto industry was worth saving with a federal bailout.
Design chief Ed Welburn was undaunted still. Knowing the way out of hard economic challenges was hard work, Welburn called together some 800 professionals in GM’s Warren design center and said, “I know you read headlines every day and every place you go, you hear about the challenges of General Motors. You guys stay focused on what you do, and when we come out on the other side of this, everyone’s going to know what the GM products are.”
GMs’s people persevered, as did Welburn himself. And on Jan. 31, 2012, Welburn, flush with success as the first-ever African-American design chief in automobile manufacturing history, having helped lead his company back to profitability as the country climbed out of the worst economic morass since the 1930s, met with America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama. Standing with the president near his prized product at the Washington Auto Show — and sitting together inside the car, a 2013 Chevy Malibu — Welburn listened while Obama gave him what he later called a candid assessment of what happened after the bailout.
“He let me know how proud he was of the work that I do,” Welburn told a reporter for an online news service, “and I was just like, wow. At the very last vehicle, he … just remarked that the design of GM cars has gotten so much better in the past few years.”
And in April 2014, with GM’s position atop the industrial scene again assured with rising sales and models rising in reliability as well as popularity, a headline in the Long Island newspaper Newsday said it all:
“Ed Welburn Restored General Motors luster with provocative design.”
Fitting praise for a man who never wavered from his dream, never faltered in his drive to be the best of the best in a world flooded with competitors from all sides.
Ed Welburn, 2015 Black Engineer of the Year
