Oliver Blume completed his first working day as head of the Volkswagen Group in Lisbon. However, the 54-year-old manager did not travel there to relax, on the contrary: Blume is meeting the company’s most important managers for a closed conference in Portugal to swear them in on his course as CEO. Over the summer, the previous Porsche boss, who will keep this function in personal union, worked out his plan for VW. On July 22, the Supervisory Board surprisingly dismissed Herbert Diess as CEO and appointed Blume as his successor on September 1.
Now some things will change in Germany’s largest industrial company. Especially in leadership style and the importance of financial goals. Unlike his predecessor, Blume is considered a team player and less confrontational in his dealings. The new boss is sticking to the strategy. “I’m a fan of e-mobility,” Blume told managers. “We have set the right course at Volkswagen.” The board around Diess “did a good job strategically and technologically”. For him, teamwork, focus and implementation are now in the foreground. “Now we have to deliver.”
The first course has already been set. The board, last inflated to twelve people under Diess, will be reduced. While the top managers are still discussing with Blume, the supervisory board in Wolfsburg announces the restructuring that has already been decided. Purchasing board member Murat Aksel and sales manager Hildegard Wortmann have to leave the board, but will retain their board positions at the Volkswagen brand and at Audi.
Blume’s previous post, Director of Production, will also be eliminated. After his predecessor had to relinquish more and more power in recurring conflicts with the employees on the supervisory board, Blume is now taking on more responsibility again. According to the supervisory board, he will concentrate on strategy, quality, design and the software subsidiary Cariad.
In addition, he secures access to research and development, which is now no longer the responsibility of Audi boss Markus Duesmann at group level, but of Porsche development board member Michael Steiner. He is now part of the “Extended Group Management”, which also includes Aksel, Wortmann and Christian Vollmer, the head of production at the VW brand. Vollmer will take over Blume’s previous position as Group head of production.
The CFOs of the group and of Porsche, Arno Antlitz and Lutz Meschke, belong to the closest management circle around the new boss. They each act as Blume’s deputy and are supposed to take on supervisory board mandates at subsidiaries such as Seat, which previously lay with the CEO. His calendar “will not change significantly,” says Blume in an internal interview for employees.
He will manage the double burden as head of VW and Porsche with “teamwork, tight planning and clear priorities”. “I will be in the same meetings that I have been attending for years as a member of the Group Executive Board: board and supervisory board meetings, strategy, finance and technology days or brand and factory appointments. Now in a different role.” That’s why he doesn’t need 100 days of training. Blume has been with the VW Group for 28 years, has worked at Audi, Seat, VW and Porsche and grew up in the Wolfsburg area.
At the start, the new boss presents the executives with ten points that cover all the current construction sites in the group, from sluggish growth in China to plans to finally become a relevant brand again in the USA to the software problem. Item ten is particularly noteworthy on the list: “Capital market”. Blume had made Porsche the group’s major profit maker in recent years.
With a view to the upcoming IPO of the brand, he had recently driven the return to 19.4 percent. These are astronomically high values compared to the mass brands VW, Skoda and Seat. Blume now emphasizes that he wants to strengthen the “financial robustness” of the group. In an interview with the “Handelsblatt”, he becomes more specific: “Each brand will be given clear targets for returns, break-even and cash flow. In the first two weeks, I will spend a day at Audi, Seat, Skoda and VW, for example, to discuss these goals with the teams,” he says.
These are different tones than Diess, who usually left the key figures to the CFO and instead dedicated his presentations to the great visions of future mobility. Blume compares the group to an “investor who has clear expectations of the brand results”. The greater the success of an individual brand, the greater the success of the entire group.
The new VW boss will stay away from social media appearances on LinkedIn and Twitter, with which Diess had reached an audience of millions. Even as head of Porsche, he avoided these channels and relied more on classic media and internal communication. The farewell videos from Diess, including a 45-minute conversation about the highlights of his seven years at VW, will not be followed by any funky moving images of the new boss.
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