Word: middelhoff
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...paying this as annual interest. TIME implied that I left "a slew of dubious new assets." The truth is that all the acquisitions under my leadership delivered the originally budgeted returns and Bertelsmann faced no write-off. You also wrote that Bertelsmann owner Reinhard Mohn "was so upset by Middelhoff's tenure." Our disagreement was primarily over my desire to make Bertelsmann a publicly held company, not about Bertelsmann's financial performance. Under my leadership, the company's revenue nearly doubled, the operating profit (EBITDA) more than tripled, and the equity quintupled. Today, the companies acquired during my tenure deliver...
...paying this as annual interest. TIME implies that I left "a slew of dubious new assets." The truth is that all the acquisitions under my leadership delivered the originally budgeted returns and Bertelsmann faced no write-off. You also write that Bertelsmann owner Reinhard Mohn "was so upset by Middelhoff's tenure." Our disagreement was primarily over my desire to make Bertelsmann a publicly held company, not about Bertelsmann's financial performance. Under my leadership, the company's revenue nearly doubled, the operating profit (EBITDA) more than tripled, and the equity quintupled. Today the companies acquired during my tenure deliver...
...Germany's Bertelsmann in August 2002. The company was laden with $3.5 billion in debt and a slew of dubious new assets, including the controversial online file-sharing site Napster and the now defunct Rosie magazine in the U.S. Still, Thielen's biggest challenge was an internal one: Thomas Middelhoff, the flamboyant CEO Thielen replaced, left behind a simmering crisis between the $22 billion firm and its key owners, the Mohn family. Reinhard Mohn, the 82-year-old patriarch, was so upset by Middelhoff's tenure that he rewrote his own governance rules to give the family a bigger role...
Thielen, 61, is both diplomatic and entrepreneurial (he also owns his own sausage factory), and he moved quickly to calm the situation, smoothing relations with Mohn and his wife Liz and reversing many of Middelhoff's most controversial moves. He abolished the post of chief operating officer and returned to the highly decentralized structure that had long been a Bertelsmann tradition, cutting 1 in 6 jobs at corporate headquarters. "The businesses are all so different and require such different management skills that one person can't run them all," Thielen says. To shore up profitability, he has sold the firm...
...link his bonus to the firm's performance. At Germany's Bertelsmann, one of the first moves by Gunter Thielen when he took over in August 2002 was to abolish the office of the chairman and the post of chief operating officer. Both had been created by predecessor Thomas Middelhoff in an attempt to consolidate power at the firm. "Thielen came in and said, 'Decentralize,'" says a senior Bertelsmann official. "More than anything, that restored calm." Thielen, a 24-year company veteran who also runs a small sausage factory in Saarland and a dental lab on the side...