Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Saga

[Steven Howard]

I have just released the first published book on the Volkswagen emissions test cheating scandal - Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Saga. Over the past weekend the book was the #1 Hot New Release on Amazon in the corporate governance category: http://amzn.to/2ltW9dA.

The Volkswagen emissions test cheating scandal is the biggest corporate and automotive industry story of the decade.

It is also the biggest corporate governance, business ethics, and corporate culture story of the decade, which is why I wrote Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Saga. It has now become the global benchmark for corporate cheating and corporate unethical conduct.

Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Saga is a story of deliberate corporate malfeasance that has impacted the automaker's car brands, leadership structure, governance, corporate reputation, current and future financial results, and its corporate culture.

This is a story full of leadership lessons on corporate governance, branding, crisis communications, corporate responsibility, and individual accountability relevant to leaders of any size organization.

Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Saga is the first book to be published on the automaker’s emissions test cheating scandal. The book is now available on Amazon in both Kindle ($8.88) and paperback ($18.88) formats.

I hope you enjoy it.

[LanDroid]

Can you give us a taste of some of these "leadership" lessons? I assume these are "lessons learned" stories of how NOT to do it?

Here's a current story about sins of Boeing. I heard investigators are requesting the names and home addresses of individual employees who signed faked documents. It's possible they will be sued as individuals and held personally accountable rather than relying on fines paid from a tax deductible corporate account.

“When you have a deliberate act, and a culture that condones such a deliberate act, that is of much greater concern from a safety standpoint,” Cox said. “If the culture is, ‘We’ve got to get it out the door,’ and we start creating workarounds and normalized deviations from required procedures, that’s a culture that it is far more likely to experience serious safety issues.”
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/bo ... ne-boeing/

[Steven Howard]

Thanks LanDroid for your comments. Yes,the book is about things not to do as a leader of an organization, including lessons on corporate culture, leadership accountability, and even corporate governance.

For instance, one key lesson on corporate governance is the need to have outside, independent directors. There were none at Volkswagen AG (in fact there still are not any). This means that any Volkswagen employee who might have considered speaking up and reporting this deliberate cheating had no one to go to who wasn't part of the management / executive team. And the Volkswagen "command-and-control" management style meant that raising problems or issues with upper management was not tolerated. In fact, there seems to have been a deep code of silence within the Volkswagen corporate culture.

And yes, as explained in the book, the Department of Justice is now deliberately going after individuals responsible for criminal acts. That's why one German Volkswagen executive currently sits in a jail in Michigan awaiting federal trial on felony charges that could total over 160 years imprisonment if he is found guilty. Of course, he'll probably cop a plea bargain in exchange for incriminating someone higher in the organization!