GM CEO Dan Akerson during a visit to China.
General Motors Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson is putting his money where his mouth is. During a conference call with GM staff, the executive insisted all the turmoil the maker has been through will ultimately pay off – something he said he would back up by personally investing more than $500,000 to purchase 25,000 shares of the automaker’s stock.
Akerson used the call to address the many challenges that have faced the automaker in recent weeks, notably including the widely discussed ouster of GM’s global marketing chief Joel Ewanick. The CEO appeared to confirm news reports that Ewanick was ousted for violating company rules – but Akerson also expressed serious frustration that the story had played out in the headlines thanks to a series of leaks.
He pointed to a news story that ran on the Bloomberg News service – and covered here on TheDetroitBureau.com – which he indicated was essentially “verbatim what happened.”
“We have to stop leaking in this company,” Akerson asserted during yesterday’s GM conference call. “It’s an act of treason. It really is.”
Addressing those who leak inside information, as well as those who don’t “play by the rules,” Akerson said they “ought to work somewhere else.”
A former telecommunications executive who took over GM within a year of its July 2009 emergence from bankruptcy, Akerson has often shown a short fuse when it comes to those who don’t deliver for GM. But his own performance has recently come under the spotlight.
Just last week, GM reported a slump in July sales and a sharp downturn in its second-quarter earnings. Market share is off for the year to date. And its stock is down to around $20, a roughly 40% decline from the price it debuted at during GM’s November 2010 IPO.
But the ouster of Ewanick has become a particularly embarrassing episode. Akerson now has effectively confirmed reported that the marketing czar was forced to “voluntarily” resign when it became clear he’d hidden the true cost of a sponsorship deal for British soccer team Manchester United. The $559 million price tag well exceeded corporate guidelines, something Ewanick tried to get around by spreading the cost among several different marketing accounts.
(For more on the Ewanick story, Click Here.)
But it’s not just Ewanick ignoring the rules, Akerson stressed during the conference call. He also noted how some employees made a video of the inside of a new GM truck and then posted it online, something he said “helps the competition.”
(Ironically, details of the executive’s comments became available through transcripts and recordings of the call later given to journalists.)
Akerson said GM will now circulate a document, dubbed “Winning with Integrity,” that employees will be required to sign.
Suggesting his frustration with the challenges he’s faced trying to change GM, Akerson lamented the fact that the global automaker operated as if it were a collection of small “fiefdoms.” Stressing the need to change the long-standing corporate culture, Akerson declared, “We’ve got to get this company and its corporate culture into the 21st Century.”
And that means GM has got to continue to bring in “change agents,” as Ewanick was intended to be, said Akerson.
Despite his readily apparent frustrations, Akerson tried to put a positive spin on the situation at GM by noting his own stock purchase. The executive purchased 25,000 shares at $20.35 each, for a total of $508,750. Akerson already owned almost 250,000 shares.