Word: chairman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that even in its better days was a social and environmental disaster. Citing the very real danger of waves of refugees hitting the Florida coast, Gore contended that "what was at stake was stopping the killing and the dying and the worst of the misery," recalls former Joint Chiefs Chairman John Shalikashvili. "He insisted we do our homework and figure out how that could be done, which in the end we did, and [we] carried...
Ironically, all this came about because two companies just...needed each other. Schrempp, the tough-talking 54-year-old iconoclast who became Daimler-Benz chairman in 1995, had already slashed the company's divisions from 35 to 25--taking tens of thousands of jobs along the way. It was an outrageous move in a country where labor rules. Schrempp wanted a new empire that would no longer depend on luxury cars, which were becoming prohibitively expensive to produce...
...because neither Eaton nor Schrempp wanted to use the word acquisition. Schrempp feared it would touch off a xenophobic outcry in Washington. Eaton did not want to seem as if he'd just sold out. But Eaton blundered. He announced last May that he would step down as co-chairman within three years and turn the company over to Schrempp. Stallkamp, sensing what the consequences might be, pleaded with him not to say it, but Eaton wasn't swayed. "I believed strongly there should not be two CEOs," he explains. "But I probably made a mistake in saying I would...
Cynics abound, especially in Germany, where Daimler-Benz had to take a huge write-off because of Schrempp's disastrous acquisition of Fokker, a Dutch aviation company. But the mountain-climbing chairman has won astonishing support from the Americans for his straight talk, quick decision making and more charisma than most rooms can handle...
...watershed moment came when the Yanks (with a little inside help) persuaded Schrempp in March to drop a long-standing bid to buy Japan's Nissan Motors. Schrempp wanted Nissan badly, to consolidate his empire, and he had been negotiating with an absolutely desperate Yoshikazu Hanawa, Nissan's chairman. But the Americans, who would have been saddled with turning Nissan around, had been uncomfortable with the plan from the start...