Choice for Chrysler CEO blasted
— -- Has newly privatized automaker Chrysler just gotten a CEO a little harsher than Attila, or is Robert Nardelli, ex-Home Depot CEO, a driven, goal-oriented cost-cutter who's widely misunderstood?
Regardless, what happens next not only will test anew the controversial argument that only a "car guy" can run a car company, but also will become a study in the contrasting styles of the two outsiders running Detroit automakers, Nardelli and Ford Motor's Alan Mulally, hired from Boeing last September.
Nardelli — to the shock of nearly everyone — was picked to be chairman and CEO of Chrysler by private investment company Cerberus Capital Management, which bought 80% of Chrysler from German automaker DaimlerChrysler.
Cerberus had said it would leave management intact, with then-CEO Tom LaSorda, veteran of the auto industry, running the show. LaSorda becomes vice chairman and president.
Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, watching the saga from retirement in California, said, "I'm shocked, and I'm going for a walk on the beach," according to his spokeswoman, Norma Saken. "He's as stunned as anybody."
Nardelli, 59, calls himself both a "car guy" and a "Chrysler guy." His says his first car was a Chrysler product, a Dodge Dart GT. And he said he owns other Chrysler models: a Prowler two-seater, PT Cruiser and a Jeep.
"This is an industry I know and like, and I'm happy to be here," he told employees Monday, emphasizing his experience in manufacturing and transportation at General Electric before he went to Home Depot.
None of that blunts criticism of Nardelli.
"This is a ludicrous choice," says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management. "He's going for obedience and execution. That's not the auto industry of Carlos Ghosn." Ghosn rescued a nearly bankrupt Nissan by building a consensus within the Japanese company that it needed radical surgery.
"Nardelli's the poster child of poor workforce relations," Sonnenfeld says.
Ken Siegel, an organizational psychologist who tracked Nardelli's path at Home Depot, called the choice "unfathomable," "stupefying" and "a supreme statement of arrogance" by Cerberus. Siegel, president of the Impact Group, said Nardelli is "an imperial CEO" who will make life difficult.
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