GM FYI Blog

By John Towriss
GM Consultant

Sherry Davis is a lovely young woman… A bright-eyed high school student who attends Redford High School in Detroit. You may never meet her and may never hear her name again. But then again — I have a hunch — you just might, and I’d like to tell you why.

I didn’t know Sherry or her mother until recently, and I only happened to meet them because I was standing next to them in the back of a small, crowded room at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) in downtown Detroit. I’m a consultant who does some work with GM, and I had spent the day at the Design Center speaking with many of the designers, sculptors and animators that work there.

Ed Welburn, the global head of GM’s vehicle design, was there. Ed is one of the busiest men I have ever met. He’s a man who oversees more than 1,000 designers working on five continents. He’s a man who designs his own suits, a man whom many of the designers I spoke to gave credit for the resurgence of design at GM. At CCS, he offered words of encouragement and told the students the practically unbelievable: that he was looking at their sketches trying to find the one good design idea that he could carry back to the drawing boards at GM.

As they called out names to come forward, one of the two young ladies standing next to me shot forward. I hadn’t realized she was one of the honored students. She charged the crowd like a running back into a sea of linebackers.

I turned to the young lady’s friend and asked if she was a friend or relative. She laughed, gave me a big smile and said, “That’s my little baby.”

Then I saw the young woman fighting back through the crowd toward her mother. The young woman was Sherry Davis, as I would later learn. It was a touching moment, but it was the look on Sherry’s face that got me: she was so proud. As they embraced, I heard her mother say, “Don’t cry baby, don’t cry, this is only the beginning for you.”

When the excitement settled down, I asked Sherry how she got into the program. She told me she had always liked to draw and had thought she might like to go into architecture, designing homes. But now, she had been bitten by the auto design bug and she thought that maybe she could make a bigger impact in her world designing cars, not houses.

Who knows? We may hear a lot more of Ms. Davis some day, and it won’t surprise me. I, too, hope it’s only the beginning. Good luck, Sherry. You’ve got me believing.

For more on the event, read about it here in Autoblog.