Nextel, incidentally, was run then by Dan Akerson who now is headman at General Motors.

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His operational guy this time was Dan Akerson, who had left MCI two years earlier for the buyout firm Forstmann Little.

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Dan Akerson, GM's new chief executive, says the company is committed to electrification and has other electric cars under development.

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Ed Whitacre will step down as Chief Executive of General Motors on Sept. 1, passing the role to board member Dan Akerson.

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The big-company culture has permanently changed, insists chief executive Dan Akerson.

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Chief Executive Dan Akerson said the auto maker was mulling a contingency plan to move workers and possibly vehicle production from South Korea if tensions there continue to escalate.

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More broadly, the move should serve two purposes for GM CEO Dan Akerson and a marketing brain trust that has been amorphously structured since the infamous departure of Joel Ewanick as global CMO last spring.

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The disruptions obviously were aimed at setting things right in the longer term, but GM CEO Dan Akerson cut short any chance that Ewanick had to see the promised payoffs from many of his major initiatives.

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Now, however at least in the view of the guy who ran the company before current CEO Dan Akerson Volt seems to have been been reduced to sort of teachable moment, an asterisk-bearing curiosity in the long arc of GM products.

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