There is a great deal of hype around the power of chief executives to create change. More often than not, though, chief executives are products of their times, rather than the other way around. The hype serves mostly to justify huge pay packages. Sergio Marchionne, on the other hand, deserved to be called a leader. He had a vision of what needed to be done to return a troubled company and industry to health, worked relentlessly to realise it, and brought many others along with him. His death leaves a void at Fiat Chrysler and in the auto industry.
In the car business, a common way to praise an executive is to say “he’s a car guy”. Marchionne loved cars — fast ones in particular — but he was an outsider to the industry. Trained as a lawyer and an accountant, he was leading a testing and certification company when Umberto Angelli tapped him to join Fiat’s board in 2003. He became CEO a year later.
Perhaps because he had never internalised the culture of the industry, he recognised what needed to be done and had the audacity to think it possible. The car industry is brutal. New generations of products must be introduced constantly, each better than the last, yet not more expensive. It is violently competitive. Marchionne saw two things: that Fiat’s consumption of investors’ capital was out of control, and that it could never produce cars that were competitive on price or quality without increasing its scale.