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Although Kleinfeld has never been implicated in anything illegal, key directors on the supervisory board that oversees management felt a clean sweep at the top was necessary to restore the company's credibility. Kleinfeld's future took a dismal turn on April 19, when his predecessor and mentor, Heinrich Von Pierer, most recently the chairman of the supervisory board and under whose watch the alleged crimes occurred, resigned under pressure. The board then took off the table discussions to extend Kleinfeld's contract, which is due to expire in September, until it had a better idea of where the investigation...
...loss for Siemens--and bitterly ironic in that Kleinfeld had acted boldly not only in responding to the investigation but also in separating Siemens' culture and strategy from that of Von Pierer's. Kleinfeld appointed the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP to do a complete audit of the company, and another heavyweight, Davis Polk & Wardell, as corporate counsel. He named Daniel Noa, a former German prosecutor, as the company's new chief compliance officer (CCO) and hired Michael Hershman, a former U.S. military intelligence officer and one of the founders of anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, as a compliance consultant...
...repositioning the company as a focused solutions provider, he split with his predecessor and broke the back of the traditional German business culture that ruled Siemens. Von Pierer, CEO from 1992 to 2005, had begun to transform the company from a sprawling bureaucracy that largely lived off fat contracts from Germany's state- owned firms into a global operator. He rationalized Siemens' many disparate businesses into a group of 13--such as automation, power generation, medical technology and telecommunications. By the end of last year, Siemens employed 475,000 people in 190 countries and generated 81% of its sales outside...
...Von Pierer was ultimately a defender of the old Siemens corporate tradition, however, always trying to balance the interests of shareholders and stakeholders, often at the expense of the former. He believed that synergies among the various divisions justified Siemens' cumbersome structure; well-performing businesses would offset weaknesses in other divisions...
...acted more like an American portfolio manager, discarding businesses that didn't meet profit targets or fit into his megacities strategy. Co-workers say Kleinfeld, a music lover who plays a mean blues harmonica, is easygoing and adaptable, a contrast to the stiff corporate culture of Von Pierer's world...