Word: messieres
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...hard to find anybody in France who feels sorry for Jean-Marie Messier, the self-promoting former head of Vivendi Universal, who tried to turn the onetime water utility into a glitzy worldwide media giant and ended up driving it to the brink of bankruptcy. But after Messier was held in jail for 36 hours recently by magistrates who opened a formal criminal investigation against him, the big question is no longer how inept he's been. It's whether he was solely responsible for Vivendi's near downfall or is just taking the fall for the failings...
...days when CEOs in Europe could count on cozy relationships with boards, governments and financial institutions to protect them are gone. In part, that is a reaction to the irrational exuberance of the late 1990s, when CEOs like Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi acted like rock stars and paid themselves accordingly, and to the scandals that have enveloped European firms, such as Italy's Parmalat and the Dutch retailer Ahold, which owns a number of U.S. grocery chains. But the change also reflects the influence of American-style investor activism and the growing clout of U.S. pension funds in stock...
...brash, swashbuckling style of fallen supermen like Messier--who referred to himself as a "master of the world" and published two autobiographies, one while he was CEO and a sequel after he was ousted--has been consigned to history, for now. "The extreme case of 'the company, c'est moi' is behind us," says Booz Allen's Newkirk. At engineering giant ABB, based in Zurich, Jurgen Dormann stunned senior managers by telling them in one of his first meetings after taking office in September 2002, "I don't like to work too hard or take decisions. You do that...
...carry out "a calm diagnosis" of the company's many problems. Instead, he was plunged into a maelstrom. Two days after his appointment, Moody's threatened to reduce Vivendi's credit rating to junk status and thus seriously imperil its finances. Fourtou's predecessor, the celebrity CEO Jean-Marie Messier, had leveraged Vivendi to the bursting point. His legacy included opaque accounts, a huge pile of debt--$34.5 billion, of which $5.5 billion had to be repaid within nine months--and no cash...
Fourtou's experience may be extreme, but it's emblematic of the baptism by fire that new European CEOs often face these days. Fourtou is practically the anti-Messier. A sturdily built rugby fan from southwestern France, he is as low-key as Messier was flashy. Unlike Messier, whose acquisition spree was propelled by a subsequently discredited vision of the future, Fourtou has taken an approach to Vivendi that is basic. Rather than embracing a grandiose strategy, he started by selling what was easiest to sell while asking shareholders to be patient. After some strategic twisting and turning, he decided...