Word: hayek
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...Hayek, 66, was born in Beirut of a Lebanese mother and an American father. The family moved to Switzerland when he was seven. With a degree in mathematics and $3,400 in borrowed money, Hayek started a one-man consulting firm in 1957 that developed a reputation for finding waste and mismanagement in everything from the Swiss army to the state radio. Today Hayek Engineering is a $1 billion business whose clients range from U.S. Steel and Dow Chemical to Krupp, Siemens and the Chinese government...
Though he claims to chafe when his competitors make cracks about his "rug merchant" bargaining methods and his "Mediterranean" temperament, Hayek nonetheless displays what he describes as "an exaggerated amount of self- confidence. I want to look in my mirror every morning and say, 'You're great.' " His strength as a businessman, Hayek says, is that he has retained "the fantasy of a six-year-old child. If you can keep and use the curiosity of a child, you can only improve everything around you." He describes his talent as being able to spot new ways of selling "emotional" products...
...Hayek, who is personally worth more than $1 billion, is passionate about his playtime too. He is a fervent tennis player and skier, owns two vacation homes in southern France, collects art (a Dali melted-watch sculpture graces his office), adores classical music, Cuban cigars and good food. "I'm a sensual kind of guy. I drink life fully," he says...
...hunger for life has an unattractive side; it makes him unreasonable or just plain self-aggrandizing. "He has the qualities and defects of a child," says SMH engineer Jacques Muller, who actually designed the Swatch. "He thinks everything is possible. Unfortunately, everything is | not always possible." Says Hayek's rival and ex-deputy Dr. Ernst Thomke, who claims to have originated the Swatch concept in 1979: "He has to be the big boss, alone, and can never share opinions. He was a consultant all his life, and he wanted to become a marketer and product developer. But he never learned...
...sunk about $18.9 million into the project, betting that advanced microtechnologies developed in the watch industry can be translated into innovative designs for a car's propulsion and electrical systems. "We're not trying to build some little gadget here," Hayek said on a private tour of the garage last December. "We want to have a consumer product that you can produce and use in the millions...