German Steel Industry after the War

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: You became very much involved in the issues involving the United Steel Works. The United Steel Works was a great combine of steel companies that had been founded in 1926, and after the war, the American authorities, particularly the trust-busters in the American administration, were very anxious to dismantle this gigantic combine. You were involved in some of those issues. How did people feel about that, and how did you feel about this notion of dismantling the great steel organizations and businesses?

I was of the opinion that active and profit-making efforts are more important than who is the shareholder. So I felt no emotional opposition against the political idea to have United Steel Works split into seventeen successor companies. I later on joined one of the seventeen, Number 15, which was Thyssen, but I did not oppose the general idea.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: Well, Thyssen, of course, did not remain number 15 for very long, did it?

No.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: I take it you have the feeling that ultimately this was beneficial to the steel industry. Why so?

The split permitted individual balance sheets for each of the seventeen. So it became clearly visible, much better than before, who did what, and where did profit arise from which activities. And then, of course, since July, 1952, we had the European Coal and Steel Community with their high authority within Luxembourg City. And this organization would permit the merger of companies A and B, and C and D, and so on. So gradually, some of the seventeen, after changes they had undergone individually, merged again with the authorization of the European Coal and Steel Community. That was the technique used.

The Coal and Steel Community was an important step in the history of Europe. Steel is an industry that's associated with nationalism, with the nation state. Tell us a little about that process and your involvement, namely, the willingness to come under a super-national institution in the interest of the whole industry and many nation states.

Mr. Kreisler, steel is the transition between agriculture and modern life. Take the history of the United States, take the history of any European country, you always find, from 1840 onward, steel as the transition. So steel was inevitable, and still is inevitable, because every motor car produced in the United States contains a few hundred pounds of steel. Whether they are originally produced in the United States or in some other country, that's a different issue. But the steel consumption of the world is still rising.

So I felt it would be useful for me -- I was twenty-nine at the time when I took the decision -- it would be useful to me to learn in the steel industry. That's what I started in 1955.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: Would you tell us about your career? Can you sketch that out?

Yes. I had worked in New York between 1952 and 1955 on the settlement of pre-war external debt of United Steel Works. And then I was twenty-nine, and had to decide [whether] to stay in the United States or go back to Germany. I felt that I should not try to compete with my U.S. peers on their home turf, so I went back. But I had a market value because I was only twenty-nine, and I had three years of active experience in New York, on Wall Street, rather. So I was invited by the boss of Thyssen to help him, and I became his personal assistant for three years. Then I took over the financial department, and yes, then I worked my way through.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: And you were Chairman of the Board?

Yes, at age thirty-six I was one of the Executive Directors of Handelsunion, the then-largest trading company in Germany. Two years later, I became Chairman of the Executive Board of Deutsche Edelstahlwerke. And when I was forty-seven, I was made Chairman of the Executive Board of the global Thyssen concern.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: And you stayed in that position?

I stayed in that position for the remaining eighteen years until I reached my sixty-fifth birthday, and was free for retirement.

This is an industry that had to modernize. Tell us a little about business leadership, running a company like this, and so on. What does it take to do that, to manage change?

If you are invited to become the CEO of a big company, the first thing you need is health. You may have to work more than seven hours a day, and maybe more than ten, so you need health. Then you need perspective. And this perspective has to go beyond profit-making. If you end your perspective in profit-making, you are forgetting the tomorrow of your own company. So you have to develop some targets for tomorrow, next week, next month, and maybe five or ten years from now. I think this is the most important thing, the targeting. Then you have to convince people, because leadership is all about convincing people. Without convincing people, you can't exert leadership. Be it in your own board of management -- you have six, seven, eight colleagues with whom to deal -- and unless you can convince them, you can't lead.

What is the key to the tough decisions that you have to make? How do you win the coalition that makes you able to lead the company as it moves to its next level of enterprise?

That is the secret of the vote-taking. In eighteen years of my tenure, I had two controversial votes only, all other votes were unanimous. So if you look into the files, which will be public one day, you will find that I had some 2,000 votes taken in my tenure, and only two of them were controversial, and in each case, only one dissenter was registered.

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