THE AUTOEXTREMIST

August 10, 2011

The Sergio Show gets preachy and the media genuflects. What’s wrong with this picture?

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

(Posted 8/8, 1:00 p.m.) Detroit. Chrysler’s Uber CEO, Sergio Marchionne, is different from you and me. He’s even different from his downtrodden and second-rate colleagues in Detroit – at least the ones who were here B.S. (Before Sergio) – as he took great pains to point out at the annual Center for Automotive Research industry conference up in Traverse City last week.

Now that there is a new agreement between the majority of the automakers doing business in the U.S. and the Obama administration to reach an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, Sergio went out of his way to slam the Detroit auto industry and the people who work in it, basically implying that they were dimwits who were unresponsive and uncooperative with our clearly gifted government leaders ­– you know, the ones who allowed a patchwork quilt of fuel mileage standards to sprout up over the years based on the whims of a loony cadre of touchy-feely Northern California politicians, rabidly delusional environmentalists and whack-job politicians in New England and Washington as if any of them had even a lick of sense or the first clue as to what they were doing – and now that all three of Detroit’s car companies were being run by “enlightened” outsiders who weren’t burdened by traditional “Detroit” baggage, this business would finally run properly, free of its serial incompetence.

“These are business people who did not grow up and become conditioned to doing business in Detroit,” Sergio said. “They accept the challenge of the new without being afraid.”

Oh really? This coming from The Opportunist of the Century, the guy who was basically handed the keys to Chrysler for nothing by an Obama administration desperate to keep the domestic automobile industry from imploding? And who before that made his bones by “turning around” Fiat, a company so screwed-up and paralyzed that even if he had just reduced the espresso machine count at corporate headquarters by half he would have looked like an industrial hero in Italy, a country that, I’m sad to say, has a real problem making money in the car business (unless we’re talking about Ferrari, of course).

Sergio suddenly acting like the Sage of the Automotive World is hard enough to take – even though some of my less-than-diligent colleagues in the media have been quick to canonize him, but more on that later – but suggesting that GM CEO Dan Akerson, that irascible refugee from the sinkhole affectionately referred to as Private Equity, who was plucked from obscurity by one of the most relentlessly incompetent corporate boards on the face of the earth because they apparently had no better ideas, is one of the enlightened outsiders who will lead Detroit to the Promised Land is pure unmitigated bullshit.

I don’t know what’s worse. Sergio pontificating and lecturing “Detroit” about the error of its ways and how he’s going to help them see the light, or implying that Dan Akerson somehow belongs here. A pompous, carpet-bagging opportunist and a corporate failure that was handed the keys to one of the biggest companies on earth simply because he was the next one up off the bench doesn’t add up to much, in my book.

Beyond that, what’s most annoying and even more insulting is that Sergio is lumping in Ford’s Alan Mulally – the gifted and focused leader from Boeing with the serious engineering and management credentials – in his Triumvirate of Wisdom, a role I’m sure Mr. Mulally wants nothing to do with.

The reality is that this alleged “concerned citizen of the world” who was just trying to help the U.S. government out in a time of need so that all the good people of Chrysler would have a job thanks to his tireless efforts has now revealed his true self.

And who is Sergio, really? Well, beyond being a carpet-bagging opportunist – which bears repeating by the way because, well, why sugarcoat it? ­– he’s a crazed, micromanaging tyrant who is setting up Chrysler not for a long period of sustained success and growth as he insists, but for yet another looming crisis in the company’s roller-coaster-like history when he steps away in 2015, leaving behind a corporate management structure that is totally dependent on one guy and a system of doing things based on that one guy. And oh, by the way, there’s only one guy – Sergio – whereupon that system can function to boot.

As you may have surmised by now it’s all about The Sergio Show, and it ain’t pretty, especially when you consider the possibility of Chrysler being paralyzed by chaos and indecision when Sergio walks away with his untold millions. (Wait a minute, even though the media might have you thinking otherwise you don’t think Sergio is going to walk away with a modest stipend because, after all, it was all about doing the U.S. government a favor, do you? Nah, I didn’t think so.)

Yet, according to some of the keyboard-dented wretches toiling away in the media, The Sergio Show runs on espresso and three hours of sleep a night! The Sergio Show is a dynamo who will lead Chrysler and Detroit out of the wilderness by way of his sheer brilliance! The Sergio Show is now weighing-in on what was wrong with Detroit and how things will be much better now that the “real” executives are in charge! The Sergio Show is speaking - we must now drop everything and stand at attention so we can bask in his brilliance!

I offer no excuses for some of my esteemed colleagues in the media. They have issues and varying degrees of personal trials to deal with that I’m not privy to, and they probably have uptight editors screaming at them for more content eighteen hours a day ­– as if this business needed anymore – but whatever their issues or reasons they need to pull away from their laptops, go for a walk around the block, roll around in the grass, or find some happy pills to take because this relentless canonization of Sergio and The Sergio Show has to stop.

It’s now crystal clear to me that Sergio believes he’s not only smarter than just about everyone on the face of the earth, in a new wrinkle he now believes that in fact he’s better than everyone else too, which means – in his mind anyway – that he’s allowed to chastise Detroit and all of the people who worked their asses off for years for all sins real and imagined (before he graced us with his brilliance, of course), and that if we all just sit up straight and pay attention when The Great Sergio speaks we’ll be so much better off for it.

What’s wrong with this picture?

On the one hand it’s good that the “real” Sergio has finally emerged, even though this guy is no surprise to me. After all, he’s been honing this persona for years, the one that suggests that companies will fail and suffer a horrible fate unless they avail themselves of his brilliance.

On the other we have an automotive media that is still in the “genuflection stage” when it comes to The Sergio Show, and it’s so beyond tedious now I can’t even imagine what another four years of it will be like.

In the midst of all of this Chrysler’s very survival depends on Fiat and Chrysler assimilating, combining, meshing and blending their disparate endeavors together according to Sergio’s “grand plan” and that is still very much a work in progress and a “we’ll see” of gargantuan proportions.

It would be nice to see my colleagues focus on that for a change.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.

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