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I’ve worked directly for car CEOs for over 20 years. I was constantly exposed to their ways of thinking. One day, I began compiling a list of their principles for maintaining their leadership position.
Here’s a key insight I witnessed firsthand:
To thrive in the car industry, you must become a thought leader in car technology.
Car CEOs who are only good managers, but not thought leaders, will be fired sooner or later. Hundreds of resignations attest to this.
To become a thought leader, you must maximize your rate of learning by accessing only the most relevant information.
The trick is to maximize curation of relevant information by utilizing the organization.
Ideally, you won’t have to go looking for this information; instead, it will be delivered to you. This will allow you to be able to stay on top of business and corporate politics, make the best decisions, earn the respect of your board of directors, employees and other stakeholders, and gain influence to be able to execute decisions into action.
Successful car managers and CEOs spend a significant amount of time structuring their jobs, as well as the teams and information flows that surround them.
Although most employees do not have the freedom to reshape their jobs as freely as a CEO does, they can advance by applying CEO principles. As you advance in your career, the general rule of thumb should be to prioritize access to the best content over status and remuneration.
Your knowledge and skills are the source of your reputation and influence. This includes the quality of your decision-making skills, the value you create, as well as your acknowledged business contribution. The career and money you make in the long run is largely determined by the value you create and your contribution to the business, so prioritizing learning is critical, and it is especially important to learn the right things.
Here are four examples of admired CEOs and their personal principles.
Luca de Meo (CEO Renault Group) – Reduce the noise to gain time for deep thought.
From 2015 to 2017, I worked directly with Luca de Meo who was CEO of the Spanish automaker SEAT. When he arrived, he redesigned established information flows, cutting Board Meetings from six hours to two. He canceled the CEO’s attendance at meetings.
Instead, he focused on the product and the brand narrative. He set time aside almost every day for silent work. During these times, anyone directly working for him could walk into his office. I recall unscheduled meetings that could last for hours.
He held the highest regard for original thought. One of his catchphrases was “The automotive industry is full of BS,” referring to the industry’s many dysfunctional beliefs. For instance, he insisted on the distinction between an “emotional car” and a “sporty car with lots of horsepower,” for example. The Fiat 500 is an example of an emotionally charged vehicle.
He was accessible to engineers, designers, advisors, and multiplicators. Everyone with half-baked ideas would have to wait or was totally ignored. If he couldn’t get out of a situation, he would sometimes mock the intruder by asking detailed questions and commenting on the answers. He was always striving for excellence in the thought process and results, but he never lost his cool.
Luca introduced a new dynamic to SEAT. With a background in product marketing, he quickly learned the entire engineering and manufacturing side of the business. He created a new, profitable brand, CUPRA, a product lineup that is still the fastest growing European brand today.
Luca de Meo was appointed CEO of Renault, one of the world’s largest automotive groups, in 2020.
Jürgen Stackmann (ex-CEO SEAT) – Be tough, be compassionate.
The automotive industry is rough and male-dominated. Particularly in Germany, where the culture is to be direct, blunt, and effective. Because this style is solely concerned with effectiveness, it can occasionally produce a rude tone in meetings and business relationships, causing fear and hesitation and leaving no room for compassion.
However, social skills are important because they facilitate human communication and information flows.
Jürgen Stackmann is an example of an effective and kind thought leader.
Every day, he acted with a simple principle: everyone has emotional needs and a personal life, in addition to the desire to be professional, effective, and appreciated. And the two are intertwined. We cannot address the professional side of a person without affecting the other side.
Jürgen was completely consistent in his application of this principle. He was so consistent that he was able to share his own personal stories without jeopardizing any respect in this harsh environment.
Even the most hard-nosed technical experts, who only competed in their domain and thought everyone else was a complete idiot, respected him. Because Jürgen was a genuine nice guy with a contagious smile. Even during the most heated debates, he could turn around and cheer up the team. People who worked with him felt respected and heard, and they could easily take criticism because they liked him.
This isn’t to say he couldn’t be firm and decisive. He was firm in his opinions and requested critical and well-founded facts when necessary.
But, most importantly, he inspired the team to work hard and provide him with the best information and decision proposals possible. Jürgen laid much of the groundwork for SEAT’s success. With the launch of the ID-family, the first fully electric car family, and the establishment of the Volkswagen brand in the EV technology realm, he was able to reclaim branding power and market traction for Volkswagen following the Diesel crisis.
Jürgen Stackmann is currently a keynote speaker and professor at the University of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland.
Martin Winterkorn (ex-CEO VW Group) – Own the product.
“Herr Professor” Martin Winterkorn is Volkswagen’s former CEO, who resigned after the “Diesel Gate” scandal was revealed. Winterkorn’s role in the scandal has harmed his reputation, and he is frequently associated with the company’s fraudulent actions. Some believe he was responsible for the culture at Volkswagen that led to the scandal and should be held accountable for his actions, while others believe he was used as a scapegoat for the company’s wrongdoing.
During Winterkorn’s tenure, the Volkswagen Group increased its annual car sales from 6.2 million in 2007 to 10.1 million in 2014. This was made possible by exceptionally well-designed standards for platforms, suppliers, and factory layouts, which Winterkorn aggressively enforced as CEO. Unlike many of his successors, he was involved in every technical aspect of every car.
Although he may have failed to prevent “Diesel Gate,” Winterkorn was the master of making cars that people wanted to buy.
Once, he was presented with a derivate action model in Walhalla, the design center in the company’s headquarters within walking distance from his office. Action models are used to revitalize sales for an aging model. This model had flashy body paint and parts with the same color added to the dashboard, the center of the steering wheel, the door panels, and the rim covers. Winterkorn was satisfied but criticized the color matching between the steering wheel and the rim covers. The designer responded, “But all parts come from the same painting machine.” Winterkorn then asked, “And why are the colors different?”
There was silence in the room.
No one had noticed the difference, but everyone knew that the old man had a point. Imagine sitting in a car with the door flung open, trying to compare two colored plastic parts, one on your rim and one on the steering wheel in front of you. How would you notice a tiny mismatch in color? “I don’t know, but the parts come from the same painting machine with the same paint,” the designer said, again. In the next second, everything froze.
Winterkorn jumped out of the car, kneeled next to the front wheel, pressed the plastic part against the wheel cover, and exclaimed, “Tell me, are these colors identical?”
They were not. A minor but perceivable difference. The old man was correct.
Although Winterkorn’s public reputation is questionable, he serves as an example of how technical knowledge and product ownership at the CEO level can drive a company. The information being fed to him had the potential to be the best, most detailed insight into the company and the entire automobile industry.
Elon Musk, a more modern CEO archetype, is widely regarded as having a similar product obsession and understanding of the CEO role.
Martin Winterkorn is retired and lives in Germany.
Simon Thomas (ex-CEO VW Group UK) – “Look and see.”
I first met Simon Thomas in 2012, when he was the Managing Director of Volkswagen Group UK, a €24 billion company with a few hundred employees. He was tasked with reorganizing the Volkswagen Group’s British importer. As a consultant, I joined him.
Simon is extremely knowledgeable about the car retail industry. He can talk about the current state of the retail industry in the UK and Europe for 45 minutes without stopping, and it could be turned into a book and sold. He knew the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the network at the time, and there were about 2,000 retailers in the UK alone, selling over 500,000 cars each year.
Simon taught me the principle of “go and see” (Gensi Genbuchu) – nothing beats firsthand knowledge to understand the state of a business. He moved his desk from the board level to the ground floor open space when he took office. The only distinction between him and another office worker was that he had a desk rather than a cubicle. Aside from that, he was visibly in the office, and anyone could simply walk by his desk. To keep intruders out, he bombarded them with detailed questions. This had two advantages for him: first, he got the best information directly from a person (rather than a memo), and second, he could assess each person’s individual contribution.
Observing the power of this principle after beginning my assignment in Milton Keynes, I traveled with my team to dealerships from Brighton to Edinburgh. Using the experience of talking to the dealers directly, even with little prior knowledge of car sales, my team was critical in developing a reorganization plan and increasing business profitability by 8%.
Simon became one of the most admired managers of his generation, as well as the sharpest and always most-informed executive in the boardroom.
Simon is retired and lives in the UK.
TL; DR – Principles of thought leading car CEOs
Successful car CEOs need to learn technical details faster than others to make sound decisions.
- Design the job so that the most relevant information is transmitted to you.
- Continually suppress irrelevant information. Make time for deep thought.
- To encourage sharing, be compassionate to your coworkers while maintaining firmness and decisiveness.
- It is all about cars and technology in the automotive industry. Attempt to be the technical thought leader.
- Nothing beats firsthand experience on the shop floor, so leave the desk and go look.
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