Word: von
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...staged a more daring than anticipated rescue. "When they can't make payroll, I get parachuted in." Good, with a background in restructuring small to midsize companies, founded Meridian in 1988 to do turnaround consulting, investment banking and mergers and acquisitions. Her partner (and husband of 32 years) Tom Von Lehman, a chemist by training, had managed a division at PPG Industries, the big Pittsburgh, Pa., glass and chemical company. He joined her at Meridian in the post-9/11 press of business to provide management expertise. She works with lenders to buy a company time and cash. Then Von...
...Good and Von Lehman now had that much time to come up with a plan to save the company and persuade a lender to advance $1 million a week to keep it afloat. The plan they presented to the board was radical. "We were changing where the product was made, where it was stored and who it was sold to," Von Lehman notes. Among the changes: transfer manufacturing and storage from Mexico to lower-cost China, update marketing, reduce the number of styles and customers, and dump millions of outdated inventory. In addition, the team recommended consolidating company functions...
...right. In Europe, any such optimism was overwhelmed by a half-century of war and talk of war. The view of a German lieutenant colonel, Baron Colmar von der Goltz, in 1883 that "the strength of a nation lies in its youth," was pretty much shared by all the muscle-flexing European powers of that era (though few were crass enough to argue, as he did, that armies needed the young because "it is only the young that depart from life without pangs.") World War I ultimately spent the lives of as many as 3 million of Europe's adolescents...
Their differences showed. In recent months, say insiders, Kleinfeld and Von Pierer often clashed over strategy. In corporate Germany, a departing CEO often becomes chairman of the supervisory board. In the case of Siemens, Von Pierer simply moved across the hall to a new office in the executive suite, sharing his old secretary and staff and even the executive washroom with Kleinfeld. Von Pierer began to block Kleinfeld from taking more radical restructuring steps, say these insiders. In the end, Von Pierer had to fall on his sword, but one tantalizing theory is that Von Pierer made sure he took...
...ranks of Siemens' multicultural community were certainly rooting for Kleinfeld and a weakening of what remains of the German Old Boy network in Munich. With the executives of the Von Pierer era either retired or under investigation, Kleinfeld was supposed to have had a free hand to go about cleaning up the company from the inside and to take his restructuring drive to the next level. But the past had one blast left, and it got Kleinfeld...