Conversation No. 006

The 100 Year Conversation

In Conversation withDan Akerson

Competition, transition, and reinvention across five decades of American industry.

In this conversation, Dan Akerson reflects on a career spent leading through transition: serving in the Navy after Annapolis, working offshore in the North Sea, helping MCI challenge the AT&T monopoly, guiding General Instrument through the analog-to-digital revolution, running major buyouts at Carlyle, and being asked by the Obama administration to join GM’s board after bankruptcy. He discusses leading as an outsider, asking the questions others avoid, rebuilding GM’s operating discipline, and why, at the end of it all, what lasts is helping others break through.

In 1970, a kid from Mankato, Minnesota, graduated from the United States Naval Academy and began a career that would take him through some of the most important industrial transitions in modern American business.

Dan Akerson spent five years as a surface warfare officer in the Atlantic Fleet before joining Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. From there, he was sent to Europe, where he worked offshore in the North Sea, helped solve a critical pipeline problem in the Ekofisk field, and earned a master's degree from the London School of Economics while working on one of the largest industrial projects of its era.

He later helped break open the AT&T monopoly at MCI, helped establish the U.S. standard for high-definition television as Chairman and CEO of General Instrument, and ran one of the most powerful buyout funds in the world at The Carlyle Group — all before the Obama administration called him to help rescue a dying American institution in 2009.

When Akerson joined GM’s board, the company had just emerged from bankruptcy after a roughly $50 billion federal rescue. But the company had only been saved temporarily. The rescued GM still had many challenges to address. The board was split between six newly appointed directors and six existing directors. By the time Akerson became CEO in September 2010, GM was on its fourth chief executive in less than two years. Nobody in the room could answer the basic questions: why had GM failed and what was needed to fix it?

Akerson was the one who raised his hand and asked.

What happened next was a rare outsider-led turnaround. Akerson insourced GM's IT infrastructure, restructured the board, made profit-sharing central to GM’s new relationship with the UAW, pushed GM to take bigger product risks, and in November 2010 rang the opening bell on what was then the largest IPO in U.S. history. By 2011, GM posted record net income of $7.6 billion.

By the time he left in 2014, the company had strung together 15 consecutive profitable quarters and reinvested nearly $9 billion into its U.S. plants.

He did all of it having never built a car.

Akerson left GM in January 2014. In this conversation, he reflects on a career spent entering systems in transition, from the Navy to energy to telecom to private equity to GM, and the operator’s discipline of learning fast, asking plainly, and confronting what everyone else has normalized.

On Childhood

Gaurav Ahuja

I want to start with childhood. By every account, you were an all-rounder — strong in academics, strong in sports, from a Navy family. What drove that? Was there a chip on your shoulder? Something to prove to your parents?

Dan Akerson

A lot of it was the culture I grew up in. My grandparents were immigrants — Scandinavian on one side, French-Canadian and German on the other — and both my parents were first-generation Americans from Minnesota. So I’m second-generation, and that immigrant culture was clearly instilled in us from both sides of the family.

My dad reinforced that. He enlisted in January 1941, served through World War II and the Korean War, stayed in the Navy for almost 22 years, and then went to college in his forties. We lived in Navy housing. Do you know what a Quonset hut is?

Gaurav Ahuja

No.

Dan Akerson

Think of a can of beans cut in half. It’s steel, about eighty feet long, and they put two families in it. One entrance at either end. There was no grass and no yard. That was our environment.

Gaurav Ahuja

In many instances, friends have described you as highly competitive. What drove it?

Dan Akerson

Well, I guess I was, and am today competitive. My brother Alan and sister Sue would likely attest to that. After all, I am a middle child. My brother and I are 22 months apart in age. It was competition from the day I was born. My siblings and I are close. Did we ever fight? Yeah. Did we disagree? Yeah. But we loved one another.

My dad was a disciplinarian, and he brought us up tough. We lived in Navy housing for many years. In our early days, we attended Department of Defense schools. Vacations were short. My parents were involved in Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Little League. My mother was a devout Catholic and a loving, hands-on person. I think she modulated my personality.

We lived in modest circumstances but education mattered. Between my parents’ two families, there are forty-something grandchildren. Nearly all of them went to college.

My mom and dad were supportive of my brother’s education. However, he had to work every summer on construction in order to get through dental school. He continued his education and became an oral surgeon.

I came along one year behind him, and my dad said, "You're gonna go to Mankato State Teachers College." I replied, "I don't wanna be a teacher." So he said, "Well, I'm a veteran, and you could apply for both presidential and congressional nominations." I applied for a presidential nomination. My dream came true. I got into the Naval Academy.

On the Navy and the Vietnam Era

Gaurav Ahuja

Can you tell me more about your experience in the Navy?

Dan Akerson

I was in the Navy from 1970 to 1975. I spent three years in the Second and Sixth Fleets, then returned for a two-year shore duty tour in Virginia. I served aboard the USS Du Pont (DD-941), a Forrest Sherman-class destroyer.

If you've never been on a warship, whether it be a carrier, destroyer, or a submarine, life aboard is hard to describe. It’s a regimented life. As a line officer, you are assigned one of three departments: engineering, operations, and weapons.

Initially, I was in charge of radar, electronics, and communications. But I had to qualify in every aspect of the Navy: engineering, weaponry, ship handling, and combat. You had to learn the whole ship, because in an emergency you might be the one who had to take charge.

Gaurav Ahuja

Did you ever consider staying in the Navy instead of moving into a corporate career afterward?

Dan Akerson

No.

I remember when my class graduated from the Naval Academy. It was one week after Kent State, and the country had turned hard against the military.

There were protesters outside the stadium. They were throwing things and calling us baby killers. Most of us were 21 or 22 years old - still young men ourselves. Yet we were about to leave home and go serve our country. It was a sobering moment.

Admiral McCain gave the graduation speech. His own son was in prison in Hanoi, Vietnam, and he stood up there and said, in effect, “This is what you are protecting. They have a right to protest.” I was angry. My father looked at me and said, “He’s right, Dan. Settle down. You’re here to defend the country.”

That took me a while to understand.

Looking back now, I was young. You can be well-educated and still not be wise. Wisdom comes later, after you’ve lived through success, failure, marriage, children, divorce, death, and responsibility. At that age, I was angry. I felt like we were serving the country, and a lot of people didn’t understand that.

Vietnam was a difficult era. My father’s generation had lived through World War II, Korea, and the early nuclear age. He was at Bikini on a ship when they tested the first hydrogen bomb, and the blast almost capsized it. Both he and my mother later died of cancer. You look back and wonder if the price was paid 20 or 30 years later.

So no, I didn’t want to stay. It was a different era, and after five years I was ready to move on.

On Oklahoma and the North Sea

Gaurav Ahuja

After the Navy, did you go straight to MCI?

Dan Akerson

No. Believe it or not, around ’74 the government passed a law saying corporations hiring could not discriminate against Vietnam-era veterans. They did so because the war had been unpopular. I sent out 200 resumes and received only five responses. Luckily, I was offered a job for Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

I went to Oklahoma and became an engineer for them. I had been there about six months when they said, “You’re going to Europe.”

Gaurav Ahuja

So what happens in Europe?

Dan Akerson

Phillips was the first major oil company to find oil in the North Sea. A conglomerate of companies led by Phillips developed the Ekofisk field. We had 18 platforms in about a 100-mile radius, and we sank a one-million-barrel storage tank in the middle of the North Sea. Eventually, several oil companies formed a partnership to develop the field.

This was not a small project. There were drilling platforms across the North Sea, pipelines running to Teesside, England, and another line carrying gas to Emden, Germany. At the time, it was widely considered one of the largest and most expensive industrial projects in the modern world.

When you drill for oil, it comes up with gases — methane, butane, and ethane. We had to separate those streams offshore, send the oil and liquids to Teesside, and move the gas to Emden. That required compression, pump stations, seabed work, and a massive amount of infrastructure. The whole build took about 10 years, and I was in the middle of it.

The North Sea is relatively shallow, and that makes it generally rough versus the depth in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. The waves can be huge. We had platforms standing in 400 feet of water, pipelines on the seabed, and the entire system depended on getting that gas safely into Germany.

While I was ashore, I applied to the London School of Economics for a master’s program. I had minored in economics at the Naval Academy. They said, "Here's a project. You've got one month to come back and write this paper up, and we'll quiz you." I did so, and they admitted me. At the end of two years, I graduated with honors.

Meanwhile, the project still had a major offshore problem. The route for the gas line involved Danish waters, and Denmark was not getting the same direct benefit as Germany or England, so they were going to be difficult about it.

If you have never been to Norway or Scandinavia, much of it is fjords and granite. I came up with the idea of blasting granite from the mountains in Norway, loading it onto ships, and using it to cover the pipeline along the seabed.

That whole evolution was my big break. Everything offshore depended on that pipeline to Emden. Two people before me had been fired trying to solve the problem, and I was the one who said, “I think we can figure this out.”

Once the pipeline landed, we covered roughly 50 kilometers and documented the work mile by mile. I was in a small three-man submarine, filming and recording the depths of the North Sea. Then I went before the Danish subcommittee and said, “This is it. Here it is. This is what we promised, and this is what we accomplished.” They gave us the operating agreement.

I called the president and chief executive officer back in Oklahoma and said, “I’ve got good news.” He started chewing me out because the gas was still not flowing. I said, “With all due respect, I have the operating agreement in my hand.” And he hung up on me. The gas started flowing the next day.

Two months later, my family and I transferred back to Oklahoma. After a short period of time, Phillips said, “We’re going to move you to Hong Kong,” and at that point I resigned.

We had a baby who had been born not long before we returned to the U.S. My wife said, “You got out of the Navy because you didn’t want to be gone all the time.” She was right. That was why I had left the Navy. For my family.

On AT&T, MCI, and the Analog-to-Digital Revolution

Gaurav Ahuja

So you leave Europe, and eventually land at AT&T at a moment when the communications world is changing completely.

Dan Akerson

My first job at AT&T was managing an underground communications facility, about 200 feet below ground. You would never know it was there if you drove by. There were cameras hidden in the trees, two levels underground, and these enormous blast doors — two or three thousand pounds each — built to withstand a nuclear hit within a mile. There was a direct line between the White House and Camp David. Communications went through this underground facility and out into the rest of the world.

Everybody needed clearance. Some people could go to one level but not the other. It was serious infrastructure, and when I arrived, it was not being run the way it should have been. So I approached it the way I had been trained in the Navy: learn the system, qualify the people, and impose discipline.

Eventually they moved me up to headquarters. They told me I had a future there. But AT&T was a bureaucracy. I mean, the Navy looked like an enlightened institution by comparison. They had great technology, great people, and Bell Labs was extraordinary. But they were not innovative because they did not have to worry about competition.

Gaurav Ahuja

And then you leave AT&T for MCI, which at the time was essentially a startup challenging a monopoly.

Dan Akerson

MCI was the first real competitive long-distance company. But we were up against Ma Bell, which owned the local networks, so equal access became the whole fight. MCI won the antitrust battle, and instead of just taking the money, we wanted access to the network.

Most of the world was still analog. Internationally, almost every telephone network was government-owned, so we had to negotiate country by country and connect into systems that had never really had to compete.

People forget how primitive communications were. Back in the fifties, when my parents wanted to call home from San Diego to Minnesota, they could not just pick up the phone and dial. Someone had to patch the call through town by town. It could take half an hour before they called back and said, “You’re connected.”

That was the world we were coming from. At MCI, we went national and international, started putting in fiber, and built a new network while AT&T was trying to catch up.

Gaurav Ahuja

And this is all happening during the shift from analog to digital?

Dan Akerson

Exactly. We had to get all these offices onto digital. It was ugly. But digital changed everything. You could compress digital signals in a way you couldn't compress analog. That changed communications, television, computing, and eventually whole industries.

I remember sitting with one of our marketing guys. Everybody had always said “family and friends.” We flipped it and said “friends and family.” That became a huge campaign.

We dropped prices 20% lower than AT&T. After being in engineering at MCI, they said, “We want you to run one of these.” So I became the division president for what was then BellSouth. We put fiber all the way from New York down to Miami. That lit me up. After three years, we went from the smallest division to the largest and most profitable. Then they brought me up to be CFO.

Later, I went to General Instrument. The FCC came out and said, “We want high-definition television.” There were four companies competing. We had this engineer on the West Coast — absolute genius. He said, “We gotta go digital.” And he was right. The stock exploded.

That’s when I learned something important: when you’re the captain of the ship, you’re not going to go down in the engine room. But you’d better have somebody down there who knows exactly how it works. And you’d better understand enough to ask the right questions.

Gaurav Ahuja

People compare today's AI boom to the telecom boom all the time. Do you think there are true comparisons?

Dan Akerson

Yes, I think there are real comparisons. Analog to digital changed how information moved through society. AI may do something similar. The effects may be broader and last longer, but the pattern is the same: a foundational technology changes what is possible, and then the consequences play out for decades.

On Operating, Investing, and Humility

Gaurav Ahuja

At this point, you've been an engineer, operator, division head, CFO, and president of two companies. How did private equity enter the picture?

Dan Akerson

I never thought I would enjoy private equity. Glenn Youngkin, who later became governor of Virginia, used to work for me. Jerome Powell also worked for me. Both of them are good guys.

But running a company is a different skill from investing in one, and it takes a different kind of personality. The combination is what makes it work. A team that pairs operating experience with financial discipline is generally going to be successful.

And, of course, you need a little humility. The thing I do not like about private equity is that when guys pick a winner, they can start to think they are the smartest guy in the room.

Gaurav Ahuja

On the hundred-year-company question — do you think the private equity model has helped build any of those, or has it been more destructive?

Dan Akerson

I think it has probably helped, when it is done well. Private equity can bring capital, discipline, governance, and a different kind of operational intensity. But it only works if you keep refreshing the team and bring in people with different kinds of experience.

Here I am at 76 — you think I’m as good as I was at 66 or 56? I’m not. And you don’t hear many guys say that. Your priorities change. You want to travel more. I used to work 16- and 18-hour days. You look back on it and say, “Geez, I missed this. I missed that. I wasn’t there.”

There is a price to be paid to be successful. The idea has to be formed, made real, marketed, managed day to day, and governed well. The person who designs the car is not necessarily the person who fixes it. You need a team. A good investment firm will have a diverse team. That is why boards are important — you want people who have experience in other areas.

On Rescuing GM

Gaurav Ahuja

You first joined GM through the board, right after the company had gone through bankruptcy. What did you see when you got there?

Dan Akerson

Well, it was multidimensional. At the time, I was a partner at The Carlyle Group. The Obama administration asked me to go on the board of GM, and after some consideration, I agreed. When the government came in and saved the company, they put six newly appointed directors on the board alongside six existing directors.

It was obviously a mess. The company had been “saved,” but only temporarily. We could have failed again, and plenty of people thought we would. GM had to reconstruct itself and address the challenges that had led to bankruptcy. I wanted to understand what had caused GM to fail.

At that first board meeting, everybody shook hands, sat down, and proceeded almost as if nothing had happened. The six new directors were sitting there looking at each other.

So I raised my hand. I was the first one bold enough — or dumb enough — to ask the obvious questions. I said, “We don’t have the background that the rest of you have. What went wrong here? Why aren’t we competitive? Why did we fail? And how are we supposed to operate with the government as our largest shareholder?”

The old directors couldn’t answer those questions. I said, “Can you give us, in 100 words or fewer, what went wrong?” They weren’t prepared for that.

Gaurav Ahuja

And eventually you become CEO. How did that happen?

Dan Akerson

Initially, I signed on simply to be on the board. I never thought I would end up being CEO.

What happened was, Whitacre said, “I’m leaving.” He did not want to be chairman of GM when it went public. Then the government said, “We have to prepare to take the company public.” And the board said, “Dan, it’s up to you to get it done.”

I said, “I’ll do it if I can have Steve Girsky as my vice chairman.” I did not expect him to manage a large part of the organization, but I wanted him on strategy.

So I went to the road show — I assume you’re familiar with the term road show. I went to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Asia, Japan, South America, and Venezuela. We went to Brazil and Argentina. I was basically everywhere as long as they weren’t communist countries. Eventually, GM went public again in what was then the largest IPO in U.S. history.

Gaurav Ahuja

Once you were in the CEO role, it sounds like you realized pretty quickly that GM required a cultural and operational reset alongside the financial turnaround. How did you go about changing the culture of a company that large?

Dan Akerson

I induced a cultural revolution. I had to bring people in who saw the company from a different perspective. This is something I believed from the day I graduated from Annapolis. John Paul Jones said, “He who will not risk cannot win.” You have to be competitive. You have to be bold. You cannot quit. That was the spirit I tried to bring to the company and to the board.

Steve Girsky helped me because he knew the industry, the personalities, and the competitive landscape. At the same time, I started studying the decisions GM had made five, 10, and 15 years earlier. I kept asking, “Why did you do this?” Why did you buy Ross Perot’s EDS and then effectively lose control of your own IT? If you don’t control information technology — not just in accounting, but on the assembly line, robotics, and across the whole operating system — how are you going to be competitive?

Here I was running one of the biggest and most complex companies in America, and we didn’t own the IT. GM had not filed its 10-K on time in more than seven years. So I hired someone from outside and said, “We’re going to insource IT.” Wall Street thought I was the dumbest guy in the world. I had to pay $100 million to sever the existing contracts. But I said, “If we don’t own IT, we don’t have a brain.”

So we insourced IT, cut costs, built two major data centers, linked every plant from Egypt to Australia, and I finally knew what was happening everywhere, every day. For the first time in years, GM could close its books on time and see the business clearly.

On Leading as an Outsider

Gaurav Ahuja

Coming into a world you had no experience in, you'd expect some imposter syndrome — but you sound like you treated it as a strength. Was the blank canvas actually an advantage?

Dan Akerson

Every year at GM, in early January, we had an annual meeting for the vice president and senior director level, before the January auto show in Detroit. That first year, I got up in front of the room — and you have to remember, we had just taken the company public in December.

It was a big success, but by January I had been in the job only a few months. We had not achieved profitability yet. We were breaking even. So I had to articulate our future before I had proof of any recovery.

I called the entire management team together — 300 to 350 people from all over the world. And the reaction in the room was, “Who is this guy? He’s never built or sold a car.”

But in some ways, that was the advantage. I was not bound by the way GM had always done things. I could ask basic questions. Why isn’t the IT organization working? Why is quality still an issue? Why isn’t the design stronger? Why aren’t we taking more chances?

I told them, “We have to take some risks.” We needed an electric car, and soon after that meeting, GM introduced the Chevrolet Volt, our first hybrid electric car. We also had to protect the high end. I wanted the Corvette to be bolder. Even talking about a mid-engine Corvette was controversial. The reaction was, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’re the industry’s muscle car. Why change?” But I thought that was exactly the kind of risk GM needed to be willing to take.

I think you ought to bring new blood into any organization. Stretch the limits. Sometimes you are going to fail. What you have to be afraid of is not failure. It is an organization that will not admit when it has made a mistake.

On Unions and Incentive Alignment

Gaurav Ahuja

The union breakthroughs were a huge moment for GM.

Dan Akerson

The union relationship mattered. I thought management had been somewhat dismissive of the UAW, so I went out to the plants and onto the assembly lines. I told them, “If management gets bonuses when the company makes money, then you should get a bonus too.”

Nobody had considered this with the UAW before, but I convinced them. I said, “Stick with me. We will take care of you.” They ended up getting more than they had asked for on an hourly basis. The company had a good year.

On the Future of Automotive Technology

Gaurav Ahuja

I grew up in Michigan around the auto industry, and people always described the rise of Japanese automakers not just as a business shift, but almost as a cultural shock — this feeling that American consumers were losing loyalty to American cars. Now you're seeing Chinese EV companies like BYD rapidly gain market share worldwide with cars that are cheaper and highly competitive. Does that remind you at all of the rise of Toyota, or does this feel like a fundamentally different kind of threat?

Dan Akerson

Yes, there are similarities. I think the U.S. has taken a step back. Tariffs are taxes. That’s Econ 101. You can slow something down, but you still have to compete on product, quality, cost, and technology.

You’ve got a huge number of countries that are going to evolve over the next 50 to 100 years. I think India is going to be the big unknown variable in the next century. They’re a good 25 to 30 years behind China. Your generation is going to be the determining one in how America competes with China.

Gaurav Ahuja

Do you have a perspective on autonomous fleets rolling out across San Francisco and other cities?

Dan Akerson

I believe our next generation will have everyone driving in autonomous cars. You get to eliminate bad judgment, recklessness, and drinking and driving. I believe that the next generation will see even greater leaps in areas such as medicine and technology. Some of it will be bad, because we are imperfect human beings. But I think it’s also exciting. I mean, I wouldn’t mind being born again.

On Succession

Gaurav Ahuja

How did you choose your successor?

Dan Akerson

Mary Barra was obviously going to be my successor. The choice drew real criticism at the time — from management, from the press, from Wall Street. Mary has since become the second-longest-serving chairman in GM history, after Alfred Sloan, and she has done a really great job.

My own view on the technology has been consistent: the industry moved too quickly toward all-electric. Over the coming years, electric infrastructure and battery technology will continue to expand, but I think the right strategy is a hybrid offering in every market segment.

Upon the announcement that I was soon to depart from GM, we had an annual senior leadership meeting in Detroit. That same crowd — the top 300-plus people we had gathered years before, the ones who'd been skeptical of me the first time I stood before them — gave me a very different reception. My departure speech was well received. I was given a standing ovation.

On Change, Timing, and Luck

Gaurav Ahuja

You've been inside a lot of companies over the years. Which one handled change the best?

Dan Akerson

I’ll be honest with you: I thought the best-managed company in anticipating change and adapting was MCI.

AT&T had extraordinary people and extraordinary technology, but it had not had to compete. MCI had to compete every day. That made the company sharper. It made the culture faster. It made people willing to bet on the future.

But I was passed over to run the company. MCI chose somebody older than me, and they said, “Dan, you need to mature a bit,” which was probably true. But I was really pissed off.

So I left and ran General Instrument. And the same lesson applied there: you had to see where the technology was going and be willing to bet on it. We developed the technology and won the standard for high-definition television. The stock went up dramatically. I made more money at General Instrument than I ever did in private equity or even at MCI.

At some point, you just have to say, “I’ve been lucky.”

But luck only helps if you are prepared for it. You still have to know the system and make the right decisions. You still have to be willing to take the risks.

On Leaving GM

Gaurav Ahuja

If you had more time at GM, what would you have done differently?

Dan Akerson

If I had another four years, it would have been a different company. I would have restructured it differently for the future.

I was always viewed as an outsider, and sometimes underestimated, because I was different. I actually got more compliments from my competitors when I left than I did from some people while I was there.

But I think you need a fresh look at things. And as you get older, you always look back and ask yourself, “Could I have done better? Was I right?” It is never black and white.

Your job as CEO is to position your successor to have more success than you did. You want to improve his or her probability of success. You cannot just play the game in the current. You have to play the game of the future.

That is true in companies, and it is true in life.

On What Lasts

Gaurav Ahuja

This conversation series is about what lasts — the wisdom behind institutions that endure. When you think about your own life now, what do you hope lasts?

Dan Akerson

I recognize that I have done well. I accrued a fair amount of wealth, and after I retired, I started the Akerson Family Foundation.

There are two basic criteria. Your parents cannot be college graduates, and you have to have at least a 3.25 GPA. We now support college tuition for about 120 students.

It matters to me because my brother and I had to break through. We had to get a college education to become successful. My parents sacrificed for that. They went into debt for it. And I know what that does for a family.

A lot of the students we help are first-generation Americans. Some go to Ivy League schools. Most go to state colleges and universities. I do not care about the name as much as I care that they get the chance.

When I die, the majority of my estate will go into our family foundation. I do not say that to blow my own horn. I just think it is important. If you have been fortunate, you ought to help people who did not get the same breaks you did.

I told my own children: do not depend on me. Go out and get an education. Make something of yourself. And they have.

That is what I want my family to be proud of. Not just what I did in business. Not the titles. Not the money. I want them to be proud that we tried to help people break through.

I have been lucky. I have worked hard, too, but I have been lucky. And when you get to this stage of life, you ask yourself what it was all for.

I tried to create a life worth living.

The opinions expressed in this newsletter are my own, subject to change without notice, and do not necessarily reflect those of Timeless Partners, LLC (“Timeless Partners”). More...

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