Sergio Marchionne’s current five year plan finishes in 2018 and Marchionne states that he will not be standing for the CEO position after that. “I will not do the next plan. It’s impossible, right. There’s a point in time in which you leave the room for young punks,” Marchionne said recently.
He noted that in 2004, he was the fifth CEO at Fiat in two years. He and Fiat Chrysler chairman John Elkann have agreed they will “never allow that to happen again” as they do extensive succession planning.
“People, they come on the list. People come off the list,” Marchionne said. He noted that he spends almost two months a year reviewing the career tracks of nearly 2,000 employees at Chrysler. “All organizations fail because of bad leadership choices. I am a very firm believer that bad businesses are caused by bad leaders.”
Marchionne said the company is focused on making sure the next generation is in place. “I can replace a lot of things. I cannot replace a great leader.”
Elkann was asked if the company would agree to be part of the auto industry consolidation. Both he and Marchionne said Fiat Chrysler doesn’t need a partner to survive.
“If there was the right opportunity, definitely that would be something that we would look very seriously at,” Elkann said. Marchionne said the company needs to be “very, very careful” before it took on another partner.
“It took us five years to create the right environment to get here,” Marchionne said of the Fiat Chrysler merger. “I think the next one would have to be equally thought through about execution – because the trick is execution.”
There is no doubting that Marchionne has turned Fiat Chrysler around, so one hopes he does find his successor by before he leaves in 2018.
