By SHARON TERLEP

(See Corrections & Amplifications below.)

General Motors Co. said it would replace its chief executive with a board member lacking automotive experience but well-regarded on Wall Street, a move whose timing was surprising and appears designed to pave the way for the car maker’s return to the public stock market.

GM said Daniel Akerson, a 61-year-old director known for his work as a telecommunications dealmaker, will take over as CEO on Sept. 1. He will replace Edward E. Whitacre Jr., a former AT&T Inc. chairman and CEO brought out of retirement by the Obama administration a year ago to lead the company out of its U.S.-financed bankruptcy reorganization.

Mr. Whitacre, 68, will remain chairman until December, when he will cede that title to Mr. Akerson as well.

The leadership change was announced after GM reported net income of $1.3 billion for the second quarter, on the strength of rising vehicle sales, especially of trucks, and firmer pricing in North America. It follows a profit of $865 million in the first quarter, and is GM’s best showing since 2004′s second quarter.

The change atop the nation’s largest car maker is part of a plan put in place by GM’s board over the last few weeks to enable the company to present a clear picture of its management team to investors as it looks to return to the public markets and allow the U.S. to cash out its 61% ownership stake.

Mr. Whitacre has long said he planned to step down after GM offers shares to the public.

“At this stage of my career, it was obvious that I was not going to be at GM for the long haul,” Mr. Whitacre said Thursday. “This is something the board and I have been contemplating, literally since I joined GM.”

People familiar with the matter said the move was decided by GM’s board without input from the U.S. government, which put more than $50 billion into GM to save the company.

Mr. Whitacre’s departure, however, was announced as some tension was building between the company and Washington, people familiar with the matter said. The Obama administration would like GM to hold a stock offering soon, perhaps even before the midterm elections in November, while GM hasn’t committed to such a timetable.

A GM IPO would likely give President Barack Obama grounds to claim that the bailouts of GM and Chrysler Group LLC are working, especially in key election races in the Republican-leaning states where skepticism of the bailout runs high.

The U.S. is expected to sell at least $10 billion of its shares in the company in an IPO, said a person familiar with the situation.

Last week Mr. Whitacre publicly expressed a preference for taking more time to prepare for a stock offering, and for having the government sell a major stake in the company so that GM can shed the image of being on government support.

Mr. Akerson, who has served as a managing director at the buyout firm Carlyle Group since July 2009, is known as a decisive, hard-nosed and often unforgiving manager—qualities that appealed to members of the Obama administration’s auto task force when they recruited him to join GM’s board last summer. Mr. Akerson declined to comment.

Since coming to the car maker, he has made a name as an outspoken proponent of dramatic change, people close the Mr. Akerson said. He played a key role pushing for the exit last year of former CEO Frederick “Fritz” Henderson, these people said.

The decision to replace Mr. Whitacre unfolded in the last few weeks. At a board meeting two weeks ago, Mr. Whitacre told board members he would like to keep the CEO job until the start of 2011. But the board felt it couldn’t make a credible pitch to potential investors without having a successor in the post, these people said. “Investors buy into a company based on who the management team will be,” said one person familiar with the discussions.

People outside GM have often speculated that Mr. Whitacre’s eventual successor could come from a group of three current GM executives: Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell, 52, who joined GM from Microsoft Corp. in January; North American Chief Mark Reuss, 46; and Vice Chairman Stephen Girsky, 47.

As the board began deliberations on Mr. Whitacre’s successor, Mr. Akerson spoke up and said he would be interested in the job, the person familiar with the talks said. Obama administration officials had seen Mr. Akerson as a potential CEO when they approached him about a seat on GM’s board, the person said.

The board saw Mr. Akerson as more seasoned for the CEO job than Messrs. Liddell, Reuss and Girsky, none of whom had run a company, these people said. The three executives could become CEO candidates at the end of Mr. Akerson’s tenure, which is expected to last a few years, according to the people familiar with the matter.

With Mr. Akerson in place, GM can move forward with preparations for an IPO and give investors a clearer picture of its strategy. GM is expected to file registration papers for an initial public offering as soon as Friday.

Like Mr. Whitacre, Mr. Akerson has spent much of his career in telecommunications. He is a former CEO of Nextel Communications, a wireless carrier acquired by Sprint to form Sprint Nextel Corp., and a former CEO of XO Communications, a provider of telecom services to businesses, which had gone through a bankruptcy restructuring.

On Thursday, Mr. Akerson signaled his management style wouldn’t be a major departure from Mr. Whitacre’s. He told reporters he “shares the same vision” as Mr. Whitacre and, when asked if there would be dramatic changes, he said it is “safe to assume” that won’t be the case.

Mr. Akerson will spend the coming months preparing for the IPO and helping sell the company to Wall Street. GM’s latest earnings report will play a central role in that sales job.

In the second quarter, the auto maker’s revenue rose 43% from the same quarter of 2009, to $33 billion, as global vehicle production rose 50%, helped by the easing of the recession and growing economies around the world. Vehicle sales grew more modestly, rising 11%.

GM ended the quarter with $26.7 billion in cash, $4 billion more than at end of 2009.

Its key North American unit had an operating profit of $2,177 on each vehicle it produced, a big turnaround from the last few years when it racked up huge losses in its most important region. Its North American plants operated at 93% of capacity, a number indicating GM is making good use of its billions of dollars in manufacturing assets. A year ago the figure was just 40%.

Customers are also paying higher prices for its cars and trucks. GM cars sold for an average of $25,900 in North America in the second quarter—$2,100 more than a year ago.

Thanks to its bankruptcy reorganization, GM is carrying just $8.1 billion in debt, a big advantage over rival Ford Motor Co., which has $25.8 billion in debt.

GM, however, still shows signs of weaknesses. Its cars don’t have as strong a following among American consumers as do its trucks and sport-utility vehicles. GM said 42% of the cars it sold in the second quarter went to fleet customers such as rental-car companies. Such fleet sales usually are less profitable.

Its international operations aren’t generating the same profit as its North American unit. It made just $562 on each car it produced in Asia, South America and other international markets, while its European operations lost $483 per vehicle.

And GM, lacking a finance unit, can’t count on profits from financing vehicles like most other car makers, although it is trying to start a lending arm after agreeing recently to buy AmeriCredit, an auto-lending company.

Mr. Liddell, the CFO, said GM is on track make money for the full year, something that was considered a long shot heading into 2010. But he also predicted a slimmer profit for the third quarter than for the second.

Corrections & Amplifications

General Motors Vice President Mark Reuss’ age was incorrect in a previous version of this story. He is 46.

Write to Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com

By PETER BREGMAN

A young woman I know is a star. In her early thirties, she had an M.B.A. and was already running a small division of a successful fashion company. She had that rare combination of design sense and business savvy that makes a virtuoso fashion executive.

The owner of her company noticed. And when the company’s president left, the owner tapped my friend for the job.

She had her doubts. In the job, she would be more disconnected from the design work she loved and she would be focused far more on finances and doing deals. More than anything, she would have to manage the owner who was temperamental. That wasn’t really her forte or interest.

On the other hand, what an opportunity! And honor! It would look amazing on her résumé, the money was great, and to be president at this young age? How could she turn it down?

So she took the job.

The first few months were grueling, but she expected that. What she didn’t expect is that it wouldn’t get better. She mastered the finances – and even enjoyed that part – but the politics of her relationship with the owner were sapping her energy. Things began to slip through the cracks. The designs began to sell less well. And the owner was becoming increasingly tense and erratic.

Within a few years, she left the job and the company.

If you think about it, the entire outcome was predictable.

We all have a sweet spot where everything seems to flow; where we feel happy, competent, in sync with everything around us, uniquely talented, and predictably successful. It feels like magic, but it’s not: It’s the intersection of our strengths, weaknesses, passions, and differences.

My friend, in taking the job, veered from her sweet spot.

The scenario is not uncommon. Of more than 10,000 people who have taken a productivity quiz on my website, a full 72% admit to doing work they neither excel at nor enjoy.

That’s a mistake. We should plan our work and our lives so that we operate in that intersection. Outside it? Chances are we’ll fail. We might succeed at first, but it won’t be sustainable.

So why do we ever leave our sweet spot? Sometimes, it’s because we want to learn. One of the reasons my friend took the position was to get experience running her own business.

But there’s another temptation at play: ego. A new job sounds impressive and the external rewards and recognition are significant, so we think we should take it, even when we might know in our gut it’s not the right fit.

A few years ago, I was asked to sit on the board of a non-profit. I was honored and I accepted. After a few meetings though, my enthusiasm started to wane. I liked the organization and I liked the people on the board, but I didn’t care enough to devote real time to it. It wasn’t something I was passionate enough about and it required that I be a strong fundraiser, definitely a weakness of mine. In other words, it failed two out of four of my sweet spot criteria.

Here’s the crazy thing: A year later, they asked me to be president of the board, and I accepted again. I lasted a year.

So, why did I accept? I’m embarrassed to say that, mostly, I liked the idea of being president of the board, even though the role took me out of my sweet spot.

At first glance, you might think the dilemma of seduction could be solved by being clear about what you want versus what other people what from you. That would be a fairly easy distinction to sort out.

But it’s more complicated than that. In fact, the dilemma is entirely within us: It’s between what we want and what we think we should want, which is hard to distinguish.

Still, in the midst of that complexity, there’s a simple way to assess an opportunity. Next time you’re given an “offer you can’t refuse,” ask yourself if it will place you squarely in your sweet spot. If it won’t, you know what to do.

As for my friend? She eventually started her own company. She works on the designs herself, which she loves, and is very close to the marketing, promotions and finances. And politics? Very little.

The company is successful, of course. She’s in her sweet spot.

Write to Careers Editor at cjeditor@dowjones.com

By KAREN WILKIN

New York

One version of the history of French art between the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852 goes something like this: Just as the French Revolution deposed the irresponsible ancienne régime, Neo-Classical images of high-minded heroes replaced Rococo confections of frivolous aristocrats pursuing love in flowery settings. (Imagine Jacques-Louis David’s purposeful, besandaled Romans, swords upraised, swearing to do something noble, versus Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s giggling charmers on swings, all fluttering petticoats and indolence.) As politics continued to change, so did aesthetic imperatives. Neo-Classicism, once associated with Republican virtue but co-opted by Napoleonic imperialism and hardened into academic convention, was supplanted by emotionally and formally liberated Romanticism, which was, in turn, challenged by a kind of supercharged, revitalized Neo-Classicism. (See Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s odalisques.)

There’s some truth in this shorthand version, but the history of art during these restless decades of political and social upheaval turns out to be far more complicated, more unpredictable—and more interesting—than this limited account. Witness “David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings From the Louvre” at the Morgan Library and Museum. A spectacular assembly of 80 rarely lent works, the show is vivid proof that French art from the late-18th century to the mid-19th, like French politics, was not a neat sequence of clearly defined positions but, rather, an unruly assortment of contradictions.

The emblem of the exhibition, prominently displayed, is a rapid sketch by Delacroix for his personification of Liberty. But the chronological sequence begins with David, himself an embodiment of contradictions—an ardent enemy of the ancienne régime who sided with the extremists and was imprisoned for his association with Robespierre during the Terror, he became, essentially, Napoleon’s court painter. David’s evolution is tracked by studies for uplifting scenes from Roman history, a profile portrait of a fellow prisoner, and a preparatory drawing for an “official” painting of Napoleon crowning himself emperor.

Artists who trained in David’s studio are also represented, their individual approaches (and shifting political allegiances) suggested by such diverse evidence as sleek line drawings of the Trojan War, episodes from Roman history in flickering patches of dark and light, meticulous portraits, and frantic battle scenes, most of them quite different from anything their teacher produced.

The most noteworthy and atypical of David’s former pupils may be François-Marius Granet, a landscape specialist who spent a good deal of time in Italy. Granet’s moody view of Rome, the familiar skyline and distant hills wrestled into being with pools of brown wash, transcends its time. No wonder Paul Cézanne, born, like Granet, in Aix-en-Provence, but three generations later, admired his older compatriot’s work.

Selected to present the unusual, as well as the iconic, the exhibition offers such surprises as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s delicately outlined, very young female nude and the caricaturist Honoré Daumier’s bold mythological scene, plus engaging examples by less familiar figures, such as Corot’s contemporary Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny’s energetically hatched pen-and-ink landscape. Yet “David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France” also includes a wealth of dazzling works by the most celebrated draftsmen of the period.

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s suavely modeled nudes, their robust, eloquent forms created by seamless transitions from light to dark, demonstrate the academic tradition at its best. The advent of Romanticism is signaled by Théodore Géricault’s urgent explorations, from an eerily lit mythological scene to a studious sketch for a history painting and a washy evocation of mounted combat. The tragically short-lived painter’s wide-ranging gifts are further suggested by a scene of a horse market, part careful observation, part homage to antiquity, done during his self-directed studies in Italy—having failed to win a Prix de Rome with his idiosyncratic works, he went on his own. As well, there’s a marvelous sheet of fierce cat heads, a study for a straining figure in “The Raft of the Medusa,” and a poignant watercolor of Géricault’s own left hand, made when he was on his death bed.

Géricault’s aesthetic heir, Delacroix, is arguably the star of the show. Whatever his medium, the confines of the rectangle seem barely able to contain his energetic marks and strokes. Delacroix’s admiration for the freedom and intensity of Rembrandt’s drawings is palpable, equally visible in a highly developed study of Christ on the Mount of Olives, in calligraphic sketches, or in a drawing from life, of an Arab, made during a formative early trip to North Africa. And some pages of explosive preliminaries for “The Death of Sardanapalus” are irresistible.

Neo-Classical incisiveness, as opposed to Romantic fluidity, sometimes with exotic (and erotic) overtones, is announced by Ingres’s exquisitely refined pencil portraits, including one related to his forceful painting of the publisher Louis-François Bertin. An elongated odalisque and a pair of unexpectedly spontaneous studies for the voluptuous fantasy “The Turkish Bath” remind us that distinctions between Romanticism and Neo-Classicism may be irrelevant. A fine selection of Ingres’s drawings from the Morgan’s collection, elsewhere in the museum, enlarges the argument.

Instructive as the political subtext of “David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France” undoubtedly is, it’s the excellence and intimacy of the best drawings on view that make the show so rewarding. In his journals, Delacroix agonized over why he preferred his sketches to his finished paintings, concluding that sketches allowed the viewer to complete the work imaginatively. The wonderful drawings from the Louvre at the Morgan let us test Delacroix’s hypothesis.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

As you read these words, millions of people are conducting video chats using the popular Skype service, now owned by Microsoft. Most of these calls are low-resolution encounters between two individuals, conducted over personal computers.

This week, I tested a new device that aims to transform Skype video chats into room-size experiences, involving whole families or groups of friends on each end—seeing each other, chatting and sharing photos in high definition using TVs. It’s called telyHD, and comes from a small Silicon Valley start-up called Tely Labs. In my tests, it worked well.

This TV add-on product is a black, horizontal bar less than a foot long and under 3 inches high with a wide-angle lens and multiple built-in microphones. It installs quickly and easily—typically on top of the TV—and is controlled by a remote from across the room that can be used to place and answer calls, and to zoom and pan your image. It can connect to any other Skype-enabled device—including PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets—but some of its advanced features require a telyHD on both sides of the conversation.

The $250 telyHD isn’t just a different way to use Skype. It’s part of the race to reinvent the television—to make it a smarter, more versatile digital device. So-called smart TVs, Internet-enabled sets that connect to the Web and run apps, are offered by most major manufacturers. The telyHD device brings added functionality and connectivity to existing “dumb” HDTVs that lack built-in online features.

There is no monthly fee or subscription required by Tely Labs, and video calls between a telyHD and any other Skype device, including another telyHD, are free. You can also make free Skype-to-Skype audio calls, and audio calls to regular phones can be made at Skype’s normal rates.

I’ve been testing telyHD in my family room on my aging Pioneer 50-inch plasma HDTV. I made multiple calls to people at the company using other telyHD units. And, with my wife at my side, in our usual seats, we made video calls to each of our out-of-state children, who were using Skype-equipped computers.

On our end of the calls, we didn’t have to crowd around a laptop webcam, jump up to fiddle with the unit, or do anything different than if we had been watching TV. Our kids reported they could see and hear us both fine, even though we were about 10 feet from the camera. One person I tested with did report some audio feedback on her computer.

I can say that telyHD worked as advertised, and provided good, generally smooth experiences on every call, whether I used a wired network connection or Wi-Fi on my end. The calls to other telyHDs appeared in high definition on our screen, though the calls to computers were lower resolution, as with many Skype calls. And, if you’re concerned about rogue invasions of privacy, the telyHD has a sliding plastic shield to cover the camera when not in use.

You can buy telyHD from the company’s site, tely.com, or at Skype.com or Amazon.com. Ironically, it is hitting the market shortly after Cisco stopped selling a somewhat similar home video-calling product. Cisco’s product cost much more, wasn’t tied into Skype and carried a monthly fee.

TelyHD isn’t just a webcam. It’s a small computing device, powered by Google‘s Android operating system. It contains software and Internet capabilities most TVs lack, some of which go beyond simple video calls. For instance, when contacting other telyHD units, I was able to send and receive video voice mails. And I was able to plug into the telyHD a flash memory card filled with pictures. I could share the pictures with another telyHD user and vice versa. I could even choose to copy a photo from the other party onto my own memory card. You can do the same thing with a USB drive.

(TelyHD isn’t the only way to use Skype for a whole-room view from a TV. Some of the new smart TVs, and even some Blu-ray players, come equipped with Skype software. When paired with a webcam, they, too, can conduct Skype video calls via the TV. I didn’t test these for this column.)

TelyHD can be placed on top of the TV, on a shelf, or on a tripod. It requires a broadband Internet connection, either wired or wireless, and an HDMI port on the TV, which is common on HDTVs. It mounts on top of even thin TVs using a built-in clamp that doesn’t require tools. I set up my test unit in about 15 minutes.

The system can’t be used simultaneously with regular TV-watching. Just as with a DVD player, you must switch to a separate “input” on your TV to bring it up. When you do, it signs you into your Skype account and fills the screen with a carousel of big cards representing your Skype contacts. You click on a card with the remote to place or answer a call. There are various screen layouts you can choose, including a small window that shows what you look like to others and windows that show tips on what the remote buttons do.

My only serious complaint with telyHD is that the remote control seems cheap, with hard-to-press buttons. But the company says it has designed an improved remote and will offer this new one free to existing owners. Also, as with many TV services, it’s a pain to peck out user names, or searches, on an on-screen keyboard. And I found a bug in which the unit didn’t recognize certain Wi-Fi network names, but the company fixed it earlier this week.

Tely Labs plans more versions of telyHD and more features. A pricier model for small businesses is in the works, which will allow live file sharing, and have a better camera and a keyboard. A second software version also is coming. It will allow the unit to send to the TV screen video from Apple‘s iPad and will also support photo sharing from online services.

The company is working on allowing video calling among up to 10 devices, though that will carry a fee.

I can recommend telyHD for people with HDTVs who want to move their Skype video calling to where whole groups can get into the picture.

—Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at walt.allthingsd.com. Write to him at mossberg@wsj.com.