Word: barnevik
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...taking office in September 2002, "I don't like to work too hard or take decisions. You do that." It was a playful way of signaling that he intended to delegate operating management to his subordinates, and it marked a dramatic change for a company whose former leader, Percy Barnevik, imposed a rigid top-down culture...
...assessment was like Barnevik himself: analytical, quick, blunt and, above all, global. As chairman of ABB Asea Brown Boveri, the world's largest electrical-engineering group, Barnevik, 57, presides over a $36 billion federation of more than 1,000 companies with 217,000 employees in 140 countries. Zurich-based ABB is the biggest single investor in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, a Western pioneer in India and an aggressive player in East Asia and Latin America. For three years running it was voted "Europe's most respected company" in a poll of executives by the Financial Times newspaper...
Last month Barnevik gave up the title of chief executive officer he had held since he created ABB in 1988 by fusing Sweden's Asea with Switzerland's BBC Brown Boveri. Though he will remain a strong presence at ABB, the move will give him time to preach his gospel of East-West economic cooperation to skeptical politicians, labor leaders and business executives. "This is something very close to my heart," he says. "If we can combine the low wages in the East with the high skills in the West, we can revitalize Europe." Barnevik believes the West...
This champion of globalization started life in a provincial setting: the isolated west coast of Sweden. Educated as an economist, Barnevik left a management-consulting job to help a troubled Swedish steel company. Success there led to the ceo spot at Asea, a large electrical-engineering firm then in decline. Barnevik carried out a radical and initially painful shake-up, dubbed "Percy's reign of terror...
...completed the ABB merger, Europe's biggest cross-border deal, in six weeks, following a key Barnevik rule: act fast, even at the risk of making mistakes. Or as the ABB "bible" he inspired puts it, "Not to take action is the only nonacceptable behavior...