The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer and former Detroit News business reporter, writes a blog,Starkman Approved.
By Eric Starkman
When it comes to professional sports, the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, and Red Wings are Detroit’s hometown teams.
When it comes to healthcare, Henry Ford Health is Metro Detroit’s only pride-worthy hospital system.
When it comes to food, a Coney Island is Detroit’s hometown cuisine.
And when it comes to automotive, Ford — and only Ford — has undeniably emerged as Detroit’s true hometown automaker, a claim GM spokesman Kevin Kelly notably declined to debate.
Remotely Run
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Hudson's Detroit (Deadline Detroit photo)
GM under CEO Mary Barra has morphed into a remotely run company overseen by executives scattered across America, including Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, Austin, Montana — and possibly a few more locales GM has neglected to disclose. It’s an insult that GM claims the four floors it will occupy in Dan Gilbert’s Hudson’s Tower will serve as the company’s headquarters, particularly since the automaker won’t disclose the executives who will work in the building full time and pay Detroit’s commuter tax.
Admittedly, GM still has about 21,000 employees at its Tech Center in Warren, but they are increasingly overseen by executives located in other cities and time zones. It’s rather comical that Sterling Anderson, the company’s chief product officer, is based in the Bay Area, some 2,400 miles from the Tech Center. So is Lin-Hua Wu, who oversees GM’s marketing and corporate communications.
Shenan Reed, GM’s global chief media officer — hired a year ago after a career in the fashion, beauty, and cosmetics industries — is based in New York City. Given GM’s mounting EV and other debacles, it’s telling that the company tapped a media chief whose background is rooted in image-driven beauty and fashion branding rather than transportation or technology.
Meanwhile, Stellantis is run out of Europe. Its commitment to southeast Michigan is so tenuous that the company under previous leadership even considered selling its North American headquarters building in Auburn Hills in a sale/leaseback deal.
Headquarters Commitment
A company’s commitment to its hometown is reflected in its corporate digs. Ford understands this. That’s why it invested more than $1 billion in its expansive new headquarters in Dearborn— a campus designed to foster collaboration and attract world-class talent. Admirably, Ford didn’t shake down Michigan taxpayers for subsidies to stay, nor did it demand public money to tear down the iconic “Glass House” that has served as the company’s base for decades.
Dubbed “The Hub,” the glass-walled headquarters anchors 12 acres of green space and allows cross-functional teams to work together — a concept long abandoned by companies pretending Slack channels are a substitute for physical presence. Most significant of all, the new Ford World Headquarters is more than twice the size of the old one and can support twice as many employees.
“The way we’re going to work in the future is very different than the way we worked in the past,” Executive Chairman Bill Ford told The Detroit News. “It’s so nice to finally be in a building where the product is… This will be great. I’ll just walk downstairs and wander around.”
Ford, whose family’s control has blessedly kept the company out of the greedy clutches of activist investors, won’t be moving into the new space until next year. In a refreshing display of humility rarely seen in today’s C-suites, Ford said that hardly matters.
“They don’t need me to keep the place going, but we need them,” Ford told the News’ Breana Noble.
Worth noting: Bill Ford has significantly increased his holdings in the automaker over the years, while GM’s Barra dumped 40 percent, and according to one estimate as much as 62 percent, of her GM stock this year, after unloading $84 million worth of stock in 2024.
Superior Performance
There’s a possible correlation between companies that take pride in their headquarters and superior performance.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon has crushed it in the more than ten years he’s run the Arkansas retailer — the stock is up more than 400%, adding nearly $600 billion in market value. McMillon has poured that success back into Bentonville, the company’s longtime home and the town where he was born and raised. Walmart built an expansive headquarters on 350 acres, and McMillon shuttered regional hubs across the country and required executives to work together in Bentonville.
Like Bill Ford, McMillon understands a company’s home reflects its soul.
Apple, under the late Steve Jobs, understood this as well. Jobs spearheaded the company’s iconic Cupertino, Calif. campus as a physical expression of its culture — a place designed for creativity and collaboration, not merely a building on which to plaster its logo and maintain a mailing address.
“It’s better to have the people and technology tools and suppliers and all the functions together to work as fast as possible in the most innovative way as possible,” Glenn Stevens, executive director of MichAuto, the automotive arm of the Detroit Regional Chamber, told The Detroit News.
Although he didn’t say it in so many words, Stevens made clear that four isolated floors in Dan Gilbert’s taxpayer-subsidized tower — a project that hasn’t created or attracted the thousands of new Detroit jobs the developer promised — are hardly a breeding ground for creation and innovation.
TeSlaa Promotion
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Isaac TesLaa with a Ford F-150 Lightning
Ford’s brilliant Isaac TeSlaa F-150 Lightning promotion is Exhibit A of what genuine collaboration looks like.
As reported by former Detroit Free Press reporter Phoebe Wall Howard in her “Shifting Gears” Substack, the idea didn’t originate with Ford marketing but with a researcher in the Model e unit — an avid Detroit Lions fan who heard on a podcast that superstar wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown had promised to buy TeSlaa a new car if he made one more of his absurd one-handed catches. The researcher issued an “all-points bulletin” across the company suggesting Ford should comp TeSlaa a vehicle.
Four days later — four days! — Ford had secured a photo of TeSlaa grinning beside a Ford electric F-150 Lightning, wearing a T-shirt reading “TeSlaa Drives a Ford,” with banners hung at Ford Field. Ford spokesman Said Deep told me about a dozen people were involved in pulling it off.
The number of Fortune 500 companies that could even conceive, let alone execute, such a clever initiative on that accelerated timeline is possibly zero.
Michigan Central Station
In another example of Ford’s hometown pride, the company spearheaded the redevelopment of the Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood and committed more than $500 million to cover some of the renovation costs. Meanwhile, GM demanded $250 million to cover the costs of redeveloping the RenCen — despite spending $25 billion in the past three years to buy back its stock.
“Michigan Central means a great deal to us all,” Bill Ford said when the building was reopened. “In many ways, this building tells the story of our city. This Station was our Ellis Island — a place where dreamers in search of new jobs and new opportunities first set foot in Detroit. But once the last train pulled out, it became a place where hope left.”
Ford has nearly 1,000 employees from its Model e, Ford Pro and Ford Integrated Services teams working at what’s officially known as The Station and other buildings on the 30-acre Michigan Central campus. Plans call from some 1,500 employees from start-ups, academic and industry partners to work on the campus. That would dwarf the 1,700 employees GM at best could accommodate at its Detroit “headquarters.”
To Ford’s credit, the company didn’t plaster its logo on the Michigan Central building because it didn’t want to discourage other companies opening offices on the campus.
Tellingly, GM won’t disclose the actual number of its Detroit salaried employees.
Agency Loyalty
Ford still uses local Detroit creative talent. The company continues its 80-year agency relationship with WPP. According to WPP Global President Beau Smith, that partnership allows WPP to maintain “well over” 100 employees in downtown Detroit working in creative, media, production, data analytics, and strategy.
GM, by contrast, dumped its local Detroit advertising agencies, inflicting considerable harm on the local industry. Southfield-based Doner, which handles work for Stellantis, even created a $1 million fund to help Detroit-area advertising professionals displaced by GM’s disregard and disrespect for local creative talent.
That disrespect apparently extends to the PR industry. According to one former GM employee, the lore around the company is that Lin-Hua Wu, who is based in San Francisco and oversees marketing and corporate communications, once quipped that there were no good PR people in the Midwest. Mary Barra, of course, is on record saying the best tech people were in Silicon Valley, so Wu’s comment seems entirely consistent with GM’s elitist mindset.
It’s a telling contrast: Ford supports Detroit’s creative community; GM abandoned it.
Beau Smith
“Ford’s commitment to the advertising talent in the city of Detroit creates a hotbed of talent all working toward Ford's common goals,” WPP’s Smith told me. My understanding is that WPP snapped up some former employees who worked at Detroit-area agencies that GM threw under the bus.
Racing Season Launch
Ford recently announced that the kickoff for its 2026 race season would take place at Michigan Station on January 15. Competitive racing has become increasing important to Ford’s global branding and 2026 marks Ford’s return to F1 competition.
In past years, Ford launched its racing season in Charlotte, where the automaker’s technical race center is located, but the automaker chose to hold the season opener in Detroit to provide more buzz for the Detroit Auto Show being held the same week. Ford continues to actively support the Detroit Auto Show despite its waning importance because the company considers the event vital to maintaining the city’s Motor City image.
“We wanted a special location for this, a building that has a lot more history around it as well, to celebrate that for the company and for the city. We want to showcase ourselves as America’s racing team,” Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Racing, told the Detroit Free Press.
Admittedly, Ford has its manufacturing problems, having issued some 140 safety recalls this year. But the company’s commitment to Detroit is undeniable — and not remotely shared by GM and Stellantis.
As for GM’s far flung executive empire, its model of having its senior business leaders scattered around the country is reminiscent of Boeing — and we know what happened to that company. Boeing also lost its competitive edge spending tens of billions on stock buybacks rather than R&D to boost its share price — another cautionary commonality GM shares with the aircraft manufacturer.
Starkman can be reached at eric@starkmanapproved.com Anonymity assured and protected.