General Motors CEO Dan Akerson — once a Navy officer — is about fed up with insider leaks of future products and internal affairs from the company’s some 200,000 employees. So much so that the former lieutenant described the act as “treason” in a recent conference call. And while he can’t have his employees court marshaled and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, he holds them all to a heightened sense of integrity.
“If you don’t want to play by the rules, then you ought to work somewhere else,” Akerson said in a Detroit News report. “We have the right to expect that people will behave with integrity. And when they don’t, we can’t tolerate it, and we won’t.”
The biggest reason is the belief that such leaks help the competition. Notably, GM employees sign a non-disclosure waiver titled “Winning With Integrity.” While this is nothing new (it’s been around for 10 years), it does draw the line as to what GM employees are allowed to say about what goes on at work without risking their jobs. We wonder if he signed it before he told the media about 200-plus-mile electric vehicles on the way.
Comments
Integrity should be the #1 characteristic of each and every employee who is employed by any company. If not they should be dismissed immediately. BUT, in many instances labor laws and unions block this process. So unfortunate.
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that he himself blabbed to the media just the other day about 200 mile electric vehicle ranges being on the horizon? (I wonder how many people decided to hold off on buying a Volt after that apparent miscue). And didn’t he just go out of his way to publicly badmouth Joel Ewanick? Akerson is a narcissistic drama queen, plain and simple, IMHO.
Yes I agree and it is time to broom his fat donkey.
Dan Akerson has done more to hurt GM than any CEO in recent memory. He’s a jackass of epic proportions. “Leaking” of details is part and parcel of keeping the public pumped up about upcoming models. If we don’t get a spy photo or a few details every now and then we would forget that certain decisions have been made and we would surely move on to other products. He may have been a military man but clearly he knows nothing about the use of information on the battlefield. It’s just a pity that we can’t get CAPTAIN Bob Lutz to replace LIEUTENANT Dan Ackerson as CEO…
Richard, I wonder if you can elaborate on the ways you think Akerson is not doing a good job…
As for the intel leaks, there is a difference between leaking information purposefully as a result of a planned, thought-out communications and/or marketing strategy vs. leaking valuable intel left and right just for the sake of doing so. It’s the latter that Akerson wants to eradicate. Not sure he’ll be successful in doing so, though…