Bob Nardelli will be leaving Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that famously owned Chrysler during the company’s 2009 bankruptcy. Nardelli served as Chrysler CEO from 2007 until the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Nardelli previously worked at General Electric and Home Depot as a senior manager. At Home Depot, Nardelli left amid slowing growth, and was then hired by Cerberus to help turn around Chrysler. Despite Nardelli’s failure, he remained in a top role at Cerberus, including a stint at the Freedom Group, which owns firearm brands like Remington Arms and Bushmaster. Nardelli was frequently criticized for his roles at Home Depot and Chrysler – he was once named as one of America’s worst CEOs of all time.
I’ll never forget his bumbling performance in front of Congress asking for money. He made Rabid Rick look good.
Vulture capitalism at its worst. Private Equity funds are the bain of America.
Do you mean “bane” (curse) or Bain (Capital)?
It should be both. Pun unintentional but very apt.
Nothing kills comedy deader than an explanation.
Care to elaborate on that?
“If you have to explain the joke, then it wasn’t a joke.”
-The Joker
Great photo, he looks like he’s about to blow a pentastar out his wazoo.
I think the Chrysler engineers probably told him there wasn’t any other item they could cheapen out until you start cutting into stuff mandated by law.
I think you’re right.
Sergio is a welcome relief!
Buh-bye Bob. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out…
Little did Chrysler know that when Cerberus owned them Nardelli had them on “double secret probation”.
+1
This guy has more dead bodies behind him (metaphorically speaking) than Saddam Hussein.
I hear Wendy’s needs a night manager in Pierre, South Dakota.
How many millions more would Nardelli have had to be paid to do a decent job?
To be succeeded by the Illusive Man..
+1
Mass Effect Reference!
Can I please have one of Nardelli’s old jobs and be paid as much as he is to just go away?
210 million. Set a record he did,
What is Cerberus paying him to leave this job?
Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to put him on a private plane to a “special conference” in the Caribbean and have the Cubans shoot it down or something?
I offered to quit my job at Home Depot for WAAAAAAAAAAY less than Nardelli, and was a greater asset to the company than he ever was even though all I did was fix rental tools. I don’t think my manager was amused. Nardelli could only manage to metrics, he had no concept of the more abstract bits of retail like product mix or customer service. In half a decade in a couple different orange boxes, I watched the management role shift from do whatever you can to help your staff sell customers good product at a great price, to a culture of hiding in the back room cooking your numbers to fit whatever TPS report you had to fill out that day while figuring out how to turn the larger and larger shipments of cheap garbage from China.
As a Home Depot shareholder, I once wrote to Bob to complain about the decline in service at Home Depot, even the flagship Atlanta stores.
I received a nicely worded form letter in return. Even now, my stock languishes, thanks to the destruction Bob brought about.
The fact that they paid him $210MM to leave is what soured me to the company.
Home Depot is what happens when you attempt to apply Six Sigma, a manufacturing process improvement strategy, to a service-based organization. It is one thing when your business is producing widgets. It doesn’t work when you’re trying to sell those widgets.
Near me in Maryland, Home Depot has improved from horrendous to “not all that bad” in the past couple of years.
I still won’t buy anything I can’t pick off the shelf and carry to the register, but given their lack of local competition, it does make life easier.
I lived in Atlanta when Nardelli was brought in to wreak his havoc. I had neighbors, friends, and acquaintences that had worked in Home Depot for years. Almost overnight, i seemed, he destroyed the culture of the company that had made them successful. People went from feeling proud of their career, and the company they worked for, to hating their jobs. It was said around the corporate office the question wasn’t would you be fired, but when. I hope their is a special, much hotter in place in hell, for people like him.
how many lives and peoples’ 401k has this guy destroyed…
For all of you referencing Home Depot and the downward spiral of that company due to Nardelli, you couldn’t be more correct. +Infinity to you all.
Submarine Captain, or Italian Cruise Ship Captain?
Back in December of 2008, I was at Chrysler’s pilot plant in Auburn Hills as the first of the new WKs were rolling through final checkout. Bob walked down to the floor and was given the keys to one of the first prototypes for the holiday break. I stood by and watched one of the engineers explain how things worked:
“This is for your windshield wipers… this is for your headlights… this is for your turn signals…”
It was that exact moment when I realized exactly how screwed Chrysler was.
Love him or hate him, Sergio is no doubt a major improvement over the Cerberus clowns that they employed.
O.-M.-G. – I don’t think I could have borne that.
How do these asshats manage to stay employed?
I keep getting into arguments on other internet forums with socialists about whether or not the rich deserve to be rich, whether they ‘earn’ their money.. then I see stuff like This Guy, and I become more convinced that it’s not about skill or talent when it comes to these rarefied upper-strata of corporate executive leverage… it’s about who saved who’s blue-blood scion from drowning in his own vomit at a frat party back in their ivy-league days.