DaimlerChrysler's Holden in Last Interview with Ward's AutoWorld: 'We Had a Bad Quarter, I Don't Know Why Everybody is Digging the Hole'
29 November 2000
DaimlerChrysler's Holden in Last Interview with Ward's AutoWorld: 'We Had a Bad Quarter, I Don't Know Why Everybody is Digging the Hole'
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Nov. 29 Eleven days before he was
abruptly fired as president and CEO of DaimlerChrysler's U.S. unit, James P.
Holden was unaware he was about to be replaced by a new management team from
Germany, reports Ward's AutoWorld.
A master marketer who was promoted 15 times in 20 years at the company,
Mr. Holden kept his salesman's optimism to the bitter end, insisting that
Chrysler was still controlled by American managers and that the company's
financial troubles weren't as bad as they looked.
Mr. Holden's optimism stands in stark contrast to the gloomy assessment of
Dieter Zetsche, Chrysler's new German president, who is predicting big losses
in the fourth quarter and beyond and is expected to announce white-collar
layoffs and more temporary plant closings to stem the flow of red ink.
Interviewed by editors from Ward's AutoWorld magazine on Nov. 1 -- in what
turned out to be his last formal interview as head of the Chrysler Group --
Mr. Holden spoke like a man who was fully in charge, and confident he would
get the troubled automaker turned around in fairly short order. He stated
emphatically that Americans were fully in control of the Chrysler Group, and
that he had DC Chairman Juergen Schrempp's full support in his effort to get
the company turned around. (Mr. Schrempp was the man who fired him less than
two weeks later.)
What's more, Mr. Holden stressed that DC's current problems are relatively
easy to fix compared with the hurdles the automaker faced in the past. He
also downplayed Chrysler's $500 million loss in the third quarter.
"We had a bad quarter. I don't know why everybody's digging the hole," he
told interviewers from the magazine. Instead, he outlined plans to cut $3
billion -- or $1,000 per car -- from Chrysler's costs to get the automaker's
earnings back in the black, and confidently said, "We have more going for us
than we do going against us."
It's currently unclear whether Mr. Holden was deliberately understating
Chrysler's financial woes in order to buy time, or whether the new German
management team is overstating balance-sheet problems in an effort to win
concessions from workers and justify the takeover by German managers.
Whatever the case, the interview reveals a fascinating look at the final
days of what could be Chrysler's last North American-born CEO, and a boatload
of now highly ironic quotes. Among them:
* "If you walk the hallways and find someone speaking German or with a
German accent, you just found a visitor ... Not because we're trying to keep
them out. That's just the way we're running the place."
* "The attitude is also that it's our problem as a company, and let's not
hide from the fact that some of it is market-imposed and some of it is
management-imposed. Now let's get at the piece that is management-imposed."
Mr. Holden also was clearly dismayed by Schrempp's comments in the
Financial Times that he had never intended DaimlerChrysler to be a merger of
equals and deliberately deceived Chrysler executives about his intentions.
Acknowledging the comments had a terribly demoralizing effect on Chrysler's
125,000 employees, he finally took the stoic approach and said: "My message to
my folks was: Get over it and get to work, because we have plenty of problems
of our own device, and we need to go fix the stuff that is controllable, and
that's what we're going to do."
A full transcript of the interview is available free on-line at
http://www.wardsauto.com . The Holden interview, along with interviews with the CEOs
of GM, Ford, and Toyota's North America operations appears in the December
issue of Ward's AutoWorld, due out next week.