Word: fiats
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...jazz-loving Marchionne, who left Italy as a teenager to move to Canada and for a while lived just across the river from Detroit, is not a micromanager. He declined to be interviewed, but in a first-person account of the Fiat turnaround published in Harvard Business Review, he talked about how he had abandoned the "Great Man model of leadership" that long characterized the Italian firm. Fiat's Great Man was the late Gianni Agnelli, grandson of founder Giovanni, whose family was nothing short of Italian industrial royalty and still controls the firm...
Marchionne has no such regal aspirations. He doesn't even own a soccer team. He's not a flashy dresser, sporting casual, open-necked shirts and spending his free time quietly with family by Lake Geneva. He's at the firm to manage Fiat, not rule it. "My job as CEO is not to make decisions about the business but to set stretch objectives and help our managers work out how to reach them," he wrote. It worked at Marchionne's previous job, as head of a Swiss inspection and verification company called...
Marchionne's most interesting challenge is that Chrysler's new owners, postbankruptcy, are his employees - the United Auto Workers, which holds a 55% stake through its retiree trust fund. His other bosses include the U.S. and Canadian governments, which hold 8% and 2%, respectively. Fiat will start with a 20% stake, which could reach 35% if Chrysler succeeds. "Politics and unions are Marchionne's biggest risks," says Carnevale. "Having politicians on the board of directors will require very complex management...
...what's his strategy? Marchionne is likely to hew closely to the playbook he used to revive Fiat. On June 10, the day Fiat sealed the deal, he announced a thorough organizational revamp. From now on, each of the four individual brands - Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Mopar (which makes parts) - will be distinct business units responsible for profit and loss. He also reached deep into the ranks, bypassing the engineers and putting a younger, energetic generation of managers with marketing experience in charge of the brands. "That's a mirror image of what he did at Fiat," says a longtime...
...Marchionne gets mirror results, he'll make two governments and a union very happy. Fiat's auto unit, after 17 consecutive quarters of losses, finally turned a profit in 2005. The time to market for its cars has dropped from four years to 18 months...