Tagged: business
Chrysler’s Sad Love Life
Marriage can be an iffy thing. Especially if you’re an auto company that can’t seem to exist without being coupled, sometimes with a parasite. That’s what the entity commonly just called Chrysler seems to be.
Full disclosure—I worked at the company for 11 years through three of its marriages. One ended in divorce, another as a result of bankruptcy and a third where Chrysler just became the second of its combined name.
I retired in 2016, five years before the company was sucked into another relationship and lost its identity altogether, as part of a blob of corporate Play-doh called Stellantis.
Keep in mind the last three letters in Stellantis are also the final three letters in the suffix “it is” which is a medical term for some sort of inflammation. Appropriate, since the CEO just flamed out and flew the coop with a nice multi-million dollar nest egg.
So this seems like a good time to examine Chrysler’s marriages from both my inside perspective and a more macro view to better understand how this corporate Sadie Hawkins should go about chasing its next partner—or should it?
In 1998 the all-American Chrysler Corp. was joined in a shotgun marriage to the German automaker Daimler AG. It was billed as a “merger of equals.” There should have been a pre-nup. There was nothing equal about the marriage. The Germans were clearly in charge.
I joined the DaimlerChrysler in 2005 as a contractor—hired to ghost write and manage the company’s first corporate communications blog. A year later, having been a broadcast and print journalist since 1973 and covering autos since 1989, a new digital communications team was created around me. I was hired on staff to run it.
My boss at the time sent me to attend the annual “communicators conference” at DCX headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. To get there I was granted a seat on the company’s plush jet.
Somewhere over the Atlantic I received some valuable insight as to how the Chrysler side of the marriage was regarded. I overheard a couple of engineers complaining that “they want us to build Chrysler vehicles with Mercedes quality on a Chrysler budget—impossible!” Yes, it was.
During the actual meeting, a German executive declared any quality issues should be blamed on Chrysler—and welcome to Stuttgart. Ach!
Some marriage. Even the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer couldn’t fix that relationship.
On Valentines Day 2007 the Germans decided to ditch their American spouse with little warning. At the “annual news conference,” held for the first time at Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, CEO Dieter Zetsche spilled that all options were open with regard to the future of the tenuous tie-up. By summer the divorce was final and Chrysler found itself in a new abusive relationship—this time with capital management company Cerberus—yes, the three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.
The upside was the company went back to being just Chrysler. The downside was everything else. Cerberus was known as a corporate slum lord and the new CEO, Robert Nardelli, known for being passed up as successor to General Electric boss, Jack Welch and for being fired from Home Depot after its stock tanked as a result of his bad decisions.
Cerberus had no experience running an auto company and it showed. Its main strategy was simply firing people. I watched as dozens of my immediate co-workers and hundreds more were suddenly told to grab a box, fill it with their stuff and take a hike.
There was a guy installed in one of the little glass offices on our floor who spent his days hovering over a computer and transferring figures to a white board with the mission of plotting where, and whom, to cut.
At one point, to make the world think the company was actually doing something constructive, the company decided to invite the automotive media, along with CNBC’s auto reporter, to anchor live coverage from our headquarters of the unveiling of a line of “production intent” electric and extended-range vehicles under the acronym, ENVI..the first letters of the word, “environment.”
There were three ENVI vehicles–a coupe based on a Lotus that went by the name Dodge Circuit, and two others based on a Jeep Wrangler and Chrysler Town and Country minivan. Coverage was massive.
In fact, the CNBC reporter called me a few weeks later to say if I could get the Dodge Circuit to New York City by that Thursday, he could get it on the Today show along with the Chevrolet Volt.
No problem. I flew out to NYC for the show and was both heartened and horrified when Today host Matt Lauer said to the CNBC reporter he liked the Volt but if given the choice, he’d go for the Dodge. See the segment here. Sorry in advance for the rough quality.
Cerberus said the ENVI vehicles would go into production by 2010 but they never did.
Greatly summarizing here, the combination of the recession and the company going into bankruptcy, along with General Motors Co., buoyed by federal government bailouts, led to Cerberus exiting and Fiat S.p.A. at first taking a partial stake in Chrysler with Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne leading both automakers.
Requiem For An Idea
This is an obituary for an idea that sprang from momentary consternation, lasted 17 years, won awards and respect and recently died a quiet, undignified death.
It was September, 2007, a month after corporate slum lord Cerberus took over Chrysler from merger of unequals Daimler. My job was head of the company’s digital communications team, which included its media website, social media, broadcast media relations and video production.
Since all news releases issued by the company came through my team to be posted on the special website for media, I knew everything we were putting out there in hopes of winning coverage.
The truth is, earned media, as it’s known today, is a crapshoot. You post and pray, and most times whomever you’re praying to treats you like an atheist.
So one day I was looking over some recent releases that were posted to the media site and realized there were several that earned little to no media at all. As a journalist-turned PR guy, I knew these items would languish for lack of major news, but as a company employee I also knew the item was important to someone, probably an executive, who was banking on seeing some daylight for his or her little bit of news.
If you’re familiar with the process of creating a news release and related assets, you know a lot of work goes into it—writing, editing, approvals, re-editing, re-approvals…..miles of red tape.
This bothered me.
So in the course of literally a moment, I thought, what if we created a weekly video recap of Chrysler news that included some of those ignored items? It would give those stories another chance to reach an audience instead of just languishing and going nowhere.
Chrysler’s main logo at the time was the Pentastar, and there was a big pentastar-shaped window on the top floor of our Auburn Hills, Michigan headquarters.
So I titled the recap “Under the Pentastar.”
My bosses instantly approved going forward, but with zero budget.
No problem. I posed the idea to my team but told them we’d all just have to pitch in on a volunteer basis to produce the feature every week. OK, they said!
A signup sheet was posted and it didn’t take long for it to be filled with volunteers, including myself.
We posted what we called “UTP” on the media website, YouTube and our social media channels.
It took awhile but it slowly gained an audience. Those of us who narrated UTP became known and even had followers.
One member of my team, the wonderful Betty Carrier Newman, was a former anchor at WDIV in Detroit. Has a great voice. In fact, our boss nicknamed her “The Voice” long before the cheesy singing show.
Betty had her fans who looked forward to listening to her golden pipes.
As a former radio announcer and network news correspondent, I’d record some of the narrations as well.
One year, at the Los Angeles Auto Show I introduced myself to a worker setting up our stand. Now remember, I was on the air at CNN for almost 20 years. But when I told him my name, he said, “Ed Garsten…From Under the Pentastar! I listen every week..love it!”
That’s when it hit me we’d really done something worthwhile.
UTP won an award from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and maybe another. Can’t remember. It was more important that we’d won an appreciative audience.
When Fiat took over the company in 2009 and later changed the name to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, (FCA) the Pentastar logo was discontinued. “Under the Pentastar” became “FCA Replay.”
Our new Italian bosses absolutely loved it and referred to it often in reverent terms.
All this time, the weekly video news recap was produced by team members who continued to sign up to write, produce, narrate it above and beyond their actual duties.
It was never slick the way an actual agency or production house might handle it, but we did our best with limited resources and it always looked at least professional.
After I retired from FCA in 2016 and the company was later taken over by the French, a new company was created called Stellantis. The team members I left behind changed the feature’s name again, accordingly, to “Stellantis Spotlight.”
All this time, our two video editors/producers, Paul Cirenese and Peter Spezia kept it going. Never missing a week. I don’t know if I ever properly expressed how much their devotion meant to me. They’re two of the most solid souls I’ve ever been privileged to work with, along with Betty Newman and our incomparable media site manager Courtney Protz-Sanders.
In recent years I would only occasionally view Stellantis Spotlight as my life in retirement took on its own life. But I would check in periodically.
It had been a couple of months since I did when this week I noted there were no episodes after September 27th. The episode is below.
As a freelance auto reporter for Forbes.com I was well aware of the cutbacks and job losses at Stellantis and suspected “Stellantis Spotlight” fell to the budget ax, which is troubling, since it operated with no budget.
A few days ago I spoke to one of my former teammates about it.
Knowing it was something I still held dear she gravely informed me my suspicions were correct.
After more than 800 episodes over 17 years, under three different titles, our award-winning little weekly video recap created in a moment’s thought and kept alive by the power of devotion, just ended without ceremony.
Look, as trite as it sounds, nothing lasts forever, especially in the corporate world. But for the rest of my life, I will always be thankful for my dedicated team for embracing, then giving life to an idea borne in a moment’s thought, simply to give overlooked stories a second chance of being noticed.
Those Uncomfortable First Days
While we’re all waiting for the world to spin back on its axis and people aren’t getting sick or afraid of breathing in public, I thought it might be fun to kill some time thinking back to one of life’s most uncomfortable episodes–that horrible first day on the job.
You know how it is…you don’t know where anything is, everyone in the office is giving you the eye wondering if you’re OK or a jerk or if you’re gonna try to steal their job or be an ass-kisser or slacker. Your main challenge is delicately asking where the washroom is and where the office supplies are hidden. Some wiseass gives you directions to the washroom, but after you memorize every turn and finally find the door as you’re about to explode, you discover the schmuck didn’t add that you need a key to enter. Sound familiar?
I’ll start with a couple of my most memorable/horrible first days, and then I invite you to join the fun by adding yours in the comments.
The date was November 30, 1981. My first day at CNN in Atlanta. I was hired as one of the first producers to launch their second network which was known at the time as CNN2. It later morphed into Headlines News and now HLN.
I had been working as a producer, reporter, anchor at KGUN in Tucson, Arizona. If you know anything about Arizona, it’s extremely laid back. No one gets dressed up, much. Especially producers.
Well…I saunter into the crazy, busy CNN headquarters on my first day figuring I’d wear my “producer clothes.” In Arizona that meant casual pants, an open-necked button down shirt and comfortable shoes. Psych. I look around and everyone else is wearing serious business clothes. Women wearing dresses. Men in dress shirt, ties, jackets, polished, black shoes. I’m already marked as a rube from out west. My boss kindly takes me aside and whispers, “you may have noticed there’s a bit of a dress code.” Well..yeah…would have been nice if someone told me in advance. But that wasn’t the worst thing about my first day. That would happen momentarily.
The boss said we should go out onto the newsroom floor and learn how the national assignment desk worked. So I go up to the first guy I see on the desk. He’s a big, balding, bearded volcano about to erupt. I introduce myself and ask if he could take a moment to explain how things work. Cue the eruption.
“YOU WANNA KNOW HOW THE FUCKIN’ DESK WORKS! WATCH THIS!!!!,” he screams at me. He picks up the tie-line to the DC bureau and starts screaming at the producer on the other end using the most vile language one could muster. This goes on for about 20 seconds. He slams down the phone, glares at me and screams, “THAT’S HOW THE FUCKIN’ ASSIGNMENT DESK WORKS. NOW GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY FACE!!!!” I took that as a most instructional lesson, took my leave and, you know, I never got the guy’s name or saw him again, which was just fine. Boss later asks me if I got the lay of the land on the national desk. I told him about the “guidance” I was given and just grinned, replying “yeah, that’s pretty much how it works.”
First day number 2. August 23, 2005. My first day at what was then DaimlerChrysler and now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. It was my first corporate job. Hired away from The Detroit News to ghost write and manage a blog for the head of corporate communications. Cool job.
I’m led up to the sixth floor PR offices at corporate HQ and plopped in my new boss’s cube for all the first day stuff. First thing I was told was to look at my new badge.
“See your badge? It’s green. That means you’re a contractor not a REAL employee. REAL employees have blue badges.” I feel welcome already. Then the next indignity.
“Come with me. Let’s look out the window. You see those parking decks close to the building. You can’t park there. Those are for REAL employees. See that surface lot..somewhere beyond the horizon? That’s where contractors park. So that’s where YOU park. It’s not too long a walk…except when it’s raining, snowing or the wind is howling. Then…it sucks. Welcome to the company!!”
I became a REAL employee about 13 months later but always hid my blue badge. It was out of consideration for the other green badged contractors who were still trudging into the office from the corporate back forty. They would also call me bad names.
Draft Day on Wall Street
phone’s been driving me crazy all weekend. Every few minutes the damn thing’s been binging with updates from the NFL draft. They scream stuff like, “Detroit picks Louie Schmeckingford of Dreck Tech as Left Nipple!” I’m happy for Mr. Schmeckingford for landing a job but truly, I don’t care. Then…bing, bing bing, bing! “The 49ers choose Dick Wad in the fourth round as backup waterboy!” Swell. I open the story to learn that Sir Wad distinguished himself in the Big Billion Conference by breaking all sorts of speed records for water procurement for sweaty slabs of two-legged beef.
I get it. Among fans and Fantasy Football geeks, the draft is almost as important as the the day they had their overbite corrected.
Then I got to thinking that maybe I’m the one who has it all wrong. What’s the draft anyway, but companies flush with money, choosing young people to join their ranks in hopes of furthering their success.
How ingenious! Why is this process limited to sports teams? It seems like a draft is a perfect way to bolster any team.
I see it now. CNBC pre-empts regular programming for the First Corporate Talent Pool Draft.
“Hi, this is Joe Kernan with Becky Quick. Business services firm KPMG has the first pick, earned via a trade with Pricewatershouse Cooper for two insider trading secrets.”
“Joe, KPMG has their eye on Barlow Biteme, who graduated first in his accounting class and won acclaim for his thesis, “Don’t Jump Off the Ledger.” 
“Right Becky. But to land him, they’ll have to cough up a huge signing bonus, a corner office and free tanning sessions just ahead of the ‘season’ in the Hamptons.”
“Who wouldn’t pay that, Joe, for a guy who not only crunches numbers, but absolutely chews them up and spits them out just the way the CEO imagined them.”
“So true, Becky! One story going around has Biteme cooking the books so well at his college fraternity, his brothers nicknamed him ‘The Chef!’ No doubt, KPMG can’t wait to serve the SEC what Biteme whips up.”
“Right, Joe! Let’s move on to the second pick. That’s comes from Deloitte.Touche.”
“Well, Becky, those pencil pushers are counting on landing Flo Nase from Wharton.”
“For sure, Joe. She’s was known there as “The Eraser.” In fact, Nase is so adept at making poor performance metrics go away, her Theory of Imaginary Computation won the top prize at this year’s Conference of Complicits.”
“Ha! That’s amazing Becky! One source tells me one of Nase’s favorite funnies is the way she plays dumb when someone challenges one of her audits by exclaiming, ‘audit? Oh..dat!”
“No wonder she’s a top pick, Joe!”
“Indeed, Becky! Don’t you just love this? Folks, we’ll be back with second round picks in a moment, after this word from upstart Wall Street brokers Questionable Quotes.”
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