GM Goes Off-Road

DiGiovanni also wanted people who not only knew how to work in GM's vast bureaucracy, but also how to work around it. Marc Hernandez, an 18-year veteran of GM's field sales, service, and marketing and now Hummer marketing director, had moved nine times in those 18 years, all the while building a network of relationships. Hummer would need to beg, borrow, and steal from all of GM to get going -- and Hernandez knew that he'd have to use all of his diplomatic powers to make it work. He also sensed that the risk would be worth it. "It's easy to get lost in the faceless ranks of GM," Hernandez says. "This time, I finally felt like I could get some skin in the game."

That "faceless ranks" problem hit DiGiovanni when he searched for someone to run Hummer's advertising. For every other hire, he'd found the right GM veteran buried somewhere inside the company. Marketing was a problem area. "There wasn't anyone in advertising at GM who I thought had the attitude to do Hummer right," DiGiovanni says.

He knew who he wanted: Liz Vanzura, Volkswagen's marketing chief. She had spent more than a decade at GM before leaving in 1996 to make a name with her award-winning "Drivers Wanted" ads. DiGiovanni figured he'd broken a lot of rules getting Hummer this far. Now all he had to do was get Vanzura for a lot less money than her résumé commanded. So instead of offering Vanzura big bucks, he offered her flexibility: To give her more time with her family, he brought her on as a part-time employee.

But if any hire showed DiGiovanni's commitment to finding truly passionate people, it was the decision to hire Paul Beckett. Beckett's hiring posed a special kind of problem: He had been diagnosed with colon cancer and was scheduled to begin weekly rounds of chemotherapy the week he was expected to start work at Hummer in March 2001. Would he have the stamina for the 14-hour days that would lead up to H2's launch? His old bosses at Pontiac urged him to stay with the division, where others could support him.

But Beckett knew that the intense Hummer job would keep his mind off of his illness: "I'd rather work on something fun while I go through this than sit in a rocking-chair job." Beckett ultimately missed only one day of work during his treatments. And his creativity helped spread the Hummer team's passion to the rest of GM: He came up with the idea for a group of "personal consultants" who took early sales orders for Hummers and kept in touch with potential buyers before there were Hummer dealers. Now Cadillac is rolling out its own personal consultants, based on Hummer's experience. Says DiGiovanni: "When a team like Hummer gets going, it's greater than the sum of its parts."

Sidebar: How to Build a Hummer (Team)

Putting together the right team was Mike DiGiovanni's toughest job. "I needed people who knew what it was like to push boulders up a hill, because that's what it was going to be like with Hummer for the first years," he says. Here are three ways that he built his team.

Search the rock pile. DiGiovanni picked people "who had their wrists slapped for speaking their minds and had been sent to the rock pile." He liked their irreverent attitudes and their willingness to stand up for what they thought was right, not what was politically correct.

Throw out the hiring lists. DiGiovanni wanted people who wanted to be on the team -- not people who were next in line for a job.

Find the networkers. DiGiovanni searched for GM veterans who'd been around the system. Conventional wisdom says that newbies are more innovative -- but DiGiovanni won with savvy vets.