Diess, the fiasco of trying to change Volkswagen

The former CEO of the Volkswagen group, Herbert Diess.Reuters

The analysis houses praised the arrival of Herbert Diess (Munich, 63 years old) at the command post of the Volkswagen Group in 2018. Coming from the competitor BMW after having passed through Bosch - since three years before he had led the Volkswagen brand - his reports considered him an executive capable of shaking the corporate culture of the consortium, which was then trying to get out of the

, the scandal that surfaced in 2015 the traps devised by the company to make it appear that its diesel engines were less polluting than they were.

Upon his arrival in office, he himself stated that he wanted a new model "that does not punish discrepancy, but rewards it" and that would allow turning "a slow and somewhat uncomfortable supertanker into a powerful fleet of speedboats", his way of announcing greater autonomy —and co-responsibility— in the dozen brands that were then in its portfolio.

In the last four years, the car giant has changed a lot, but it is still a supertanker that has ended up overwhelming the one who was called to be its captain until 2025, according to the contract that Diess renewed just a year ago.

The executive has been a victim of that corporate culture that he wanted to change and there are those who explain his fall precisely because he did not have the DNA of Volkswagen, an industrial conglomerate in which, as in other German companies, the unions have an unusual strength through their presence on the supervisory board, which is controlled by half of its members.

It was a matter of getting along with them and, on the contrary, the manager had been generating such discomfort among the nearly 700,000 employees that, along with other management and communication problems,

Diess is no different from other auto company executives.

He arrived with the same fame as a cost-

, in English— that Carlos Tavares (Stellantis) or Carlos Ghosn (Nissan-Renault) and the pioneer in that area, José Ignacio López de Arriortúa, had.

In his four years at the helm of the group, he has more than managed to reduce costs by half a point with respect to sales revenue, and the result could have been greater had it not been for the blow that the covid and its collateral effects hit the sector.

The former CEO of the Volkswagen group, Herbert Diess, poses inside the ID Buzz van of the German brand. AFP

Even without that inconvenience, Diess has shown its shareholders the ability to give them 3.5 billion euros more in dividends than when it had no control in place.

He has put the pitfalls of diesel engines behind with the biggest push designed by any manufacturer to launch zero-emission cars.

The IPO of Traton, its truck subsidiary, has been completed, it has been behind the preparations for the sports car manufacturer Porsche to follow the same path and it already had in mind taking PowerCo, the new company that will be in charge of managing its factories, off the market of battery cells, a business that aims to be golden in the era of the electric vehicle.

For all these reasons, he was not entirely surprised by the renewal of his contract and keeping him ahead of Toyota's competitor for being the largest car manufacturer in the world.

Yes, the sudden termination announced last Friday did.

Although failures are told to him, the cold results with which Volkswagen has entered China or the continued problems of Cariad, the subsidiary in charge of developing the computer program for its vehicles, the merciless dismissal at the gates of Diess's vacations may be explains more by hints or wishes than by facts.

The group's 2017 annual report showed the group had 642,300 workers, while four years later that figure was 672,800.

But the executive had not hidden in stating that the group had 30,000 workers left over in Germany if it intended to compete with the productivity of the American Tesla and be crowned, in addition to being the largest global manufacturer, as the main manufacturer of electric vehicles.

The president of the works council of the Volkswagen Group, Daniela Cavallo, has had no problem keeping a pulse on her, aware of the power that controlling half of the 20 members of the supervisory council gives her and made it clear to her three weeks ago in an act protocol in which the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was also present.

There, before hundreds of spectators who were workers during the laying of the first stone of the group's first battery factory, he made it clear to Diess and to the person finally chosen to replace him - Porsche director Oliver Blume - that "the change is not is dramatic” and that the production of electric cars, which require 30% fewer working hours, does not have to mean layoffs.

Diess has had no problem singing the virtues of a Californian brand like Tesla landing in Berlin to demonstrate to its staff that they had competitiveness a few hundred kilometers away, nor did it have any problem photographing itself with Elon Musk, the catalyst for the success of the American brand, and even invite him to an event with Volkswagen executives.

And he has had to apologize, on many occasions, for misplaced statements.

When he rightly accused the unions of leaking information from the supervisory board to the media and especially when he launched at his managers a "profits will make you free" —"

, a statement excessively similar to the motto that presides over the access to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

The last mistake was made on July 22 in one of his usual publications on the LinkedIn social network, when he said goodbye to face a "well-deserved summer vacation", which he would probably spend his second residence in Laredo (Cantabria).

He didn't know that in a few hours he would be fired from him.

His discrepancies had no prize.

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber