Word: vivendi
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...performance targets. Debt tumbled from $66.7 billion to $51 billion in his first year, in part because Breton persuaded the French government and bondholders to put up fresh capital. Coming in a close second is Jean-Rene Fourtou, 64, a drug-industry veteran who took over France's teetering Vivendi two years ago, and is turning it around (see next story...
When Jean-Rene Fourtou took over as chief executive of Vivendi Universal on July 3, 2002, he says, he planned to 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...
...running smoothly for long. A few weeks later, he borrowed $1.96 billion more. Then Fourtou took out his scalpel and started to operate. "It was a matter of survival," he tells TIME. "I had to survive the first days, then the first weeks." Even though Moody's did downgrade Vivendi, Fourtou has pulled the company through...
...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 to spin off Universal to NBC, with Vivendi retaining a 20% stake in the venture...
Fourtou, a connoisseur of Bordeaux wine, was in his early 60s and cruising comfortably toward retirement after 16 years as head of the pharmaceutical firm Rhone-Poulenc, now part of Aventis. But the Vivendi board was desperate to find a respected executive to calm the company. Fourtou, who is 64, initially resisted but has since performed brilliantly. He has sold off about $12 billion in assets--not including Universal--and reshaped Vivendi around its telecommunications, music and French TV businesses. Those pieces don't make a great strategic fit, his critics point out, but Vivendi is a far more manageable...