I realize that the VW CEO is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the company, but if it can be shown that he had nothing to do what had happened would he still be obligated to step down? Why sacrifice a perfectly good CEO because of the misdeeds of some underlings? Of course if the CEO knew about what happened and did nothing, or worse was involved in the decision, that’s a different story.
There’s no upside for VW in this. the next several years are going to be hell on VW management, and maybe he didn’t want any part of it.
of course, the conspiracy theorists believe Ferdinand Piëch is cackling away somewhere hissing “Good… Good… Everything is going exactly to plan.”
I always like to think that stepping down is what a CEO is for!
Its like part of the deal, you get a massive salary and millions in bonuses, but when the shit hits the fan then you have to take the fall, whether it was your fault or not.
For Volkswagon, they can now claim that heads have rolled and they are going to fix the problems that the previous management created, so lets now move on and stop looking at us… It will probably work too.
If he was behind the whole thing, he should step down. If he had absolutely no idea what was going on, that’s kind of even worse, and he should step down.
That makes sense. You sacrifice a high ranking official in hopes of distracting people from looking too closely at how things really work in your company.
+1
Very well said. He either way, he needs to go.
No CEO knows everything that goes on in a company. To say he should have known this is like saying he should know why they chose a particular design for one of 20,000 parts in a car. They can’t be expected to know everything. The CEO is just a scapegoat in this case.
They need a sacrificial lamb, to show they’re taking this seriously. For a scandal as serious as this, some nameless engineer or software programmer simply won’t do. The gods of government wrath will not be appeased by anything less than the CEO’s head.
…but in terms of actual culpability, I’ll be pretty surprised if the CEO knew this was going on.
I’d say bullshit to this.
VW took a huge risk on this piss poor decision, one that will effect the company for years and years to come, with billions of dollars at stake. This wasn’t a decision concerning using navy blue or black thread on the floor mats. This was a decision that went to the core of the company’s credibility which it has spent decades building.
I’ll reiterate what was written above. If he approved this he should be fired. If he didn’t know about a decision of this magnitude, he should be fired for not knowing.
One can expect a CEO to enforce reasonable standards of engineering review with the expectation that in a company as large as VW, unethical employees trying to get away with something are inevitable. The cheating software should have been caught in code review. The fact that it wasn’t means either that either there was no code review, or there was code review and all of the reviewers went along with the cheating. It is a reasonable expectation that the CEO would ensure that neither of those situations would be the case.
It would be like if some low level employee of a large bank was caught taking transferring money from other people’s accounts to those of the hookers and drug dealers he’d been purchasing services from, and this was found out years after the fact by people outside the bank. It would be unreasonable to say to the CEO, “Every one of your million employees should have been perfectly morally upright”. But it would be reasonable to say, “You should have had security and monitoring in place to ensure that low level employees do not have access to accounts beyond what is needed for their work, and you should have auditing in place so transgressions were caught quickly”.
Part of any boss’s job is making sure that their underlings are doing their job properly, and that they have the resources they need to do it. No, a boss of a gigantic company isn’t responsible for a minor screwup by a minion, but this was deliberate – potentially criminal – malfeasance of a colossal scale that went on for years. The fact is Winterkorn or his immediate subordinates probably hired the managers who thought this was a good idea and worked to cover it up, and he is ultimately responsible for fostering a corporate culture that allowed such unethical behavior to occur in the first place and failed to correct it in the second.
I think it’s telling that anyone would find Winterkorn’s resignation surprising. “The buck stops here” used to be a vaunted moral. Now it’s more like “the buck stops with whoever successfully hid this from me!”
Moderator Action
I doubt that the VW CEO is going to go on the record to explain in detail why he did what he did, which leaves this question with mostly speculation and opinion rather than a factual answer. Accordingly, let’s move this to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
This was absolutely not something let in by a rouge employee. The people that wrote the code for the computer would need input from a wide variety of engineering disciplines within the company. If the software was written in a similar manor to where I work there were some systems engineers that came up with an algorithm. This algorithm was them reviewed by a large team of people. Then the actual code was written by people other than the system engineers and tested by yet a different set of people. I can believe that the CEO might not know about this specifically but this was in a number of models in both VW and Audi cars. It was authorized at a very high level.
Do we know for sure if the persons who did this actually worked at VW? They may have outsourced that piece of software. Is the VW CEO also responsible for everything their outsources do?
I know the saying ‘the buck stops here’, but blaming the VW CEO seems silly unless he was directly involved in the act or the cover up, which I haven’t heard anyone claim yet.
I don’t think you have an appreciation for how big this scandal actually is.
Yes.
Especially of this magnitude.
And why do you think that a subcontractor (if it was one, which we don’t know) would do this on their own?
If people at VW outsourced it, they must have requested the functions that the software had. They were no accident. It basically makes no difference if it were outsourced (which I think would be very unlikely) or not .
He’s would certainly be responsible if his subordinates requested that a contractor develop software that gave fraudulent results.
I don’t know why you would think this would in some way absolve VW.
To quote Don Draper in Mad Men - “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY’S FOR!!”
No, the CEO is responsible for the culture of the organization. Apparently there was a culture of cheating and non-compliance within VW. Something of the magnitude that happened should have been known within the company and by the senior management, if it wasn’t, there was a breakdown in the compliance systems, etc. That falls at the feet of the CEO. Not a scapegoat, but truly responsible.
ETA: You can delegate the authority, but you can’t delegate the responsibility.
Absolutely. This is clearly not one engineer (or a small group) cutting a corner, or coming up with a dirty trick, to get their job done. This was clearly a case of the company (or, at least, large divisions within the company) realizing that they would not be able to meet emission standards while simultaneously delivering desired performance…and then, authorizing and developing an elaborate, secret, and illegal work-around to defeat the emissions tests. Such a decision was undoubtedly made by senior management, even if the CEO himself wasn’t a direct decision-maker.
Even if outside contractors were involved, they were undoubtedly doing so under orders from VW.