Word: thielen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Metall, Germany's biggest engineering union, staged its own "warning strike," the first in a series aimed at winning a 5% increase in wages. The walkouts expose a yawning gap between workers' expectations and employers' ability to pay. The Merkel Factor, it seems, won't guarantee endless patience. Gunter Thielen, chairman and ceo of Bertelsmann, tells Time: "The grand coalition under Mrs. Merkel's leadership is off to a good start. But the way I see it, urgent reform projects still remain to be tackled. Courageous steps are called for here...
...Revising the Record As much as I am happy that Bertelsmann's CEO Gunter Thielen was included in TIME's list of the 25 most influential people in business today [Dec. 20], I am sorry to see that certain facts in the accompanying article were incorrect. TIME implied that I left Thielen with debts of $3.5 billion. At the end of my tenure as Bertelsmann's CEO, its debt was $334 million, the lowest of all big media corporations that I know of. Companies like Time Warner, Disney and Vivendi Universal are paying this as annual interest. TIME implied that...
...pill-taking mentality. But the magic bullet for hypertension is not in a bottle; it's a healthy lifestyle. How about making the right foods more affordable? Lisa A. Lee Rancho Santa Margarita, California, U.S. Revising the Record As much as I am happy that Bertelsmann's CEO Gunter Thielen was included in TIME's list of the 25 most influential people in business today [Dec. 20], I am sorry to see that certain facts in the accompanying article were incorrect. TIME implies that I left Thielen with debts of $3.5 billion. At the end of my tenure as Bertelsmann...
...Gunter Thielen didn't expect to play peacemaker when he took over as chief executive of 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...
...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...