At the head of the German car giant since 2018, the manager was criticized for his rough management. His successor, Oliver Blume, will have to continue the transition to the electric, while instilling “a team spirit”.
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He was sitting in an ejectable seat, but his departure is nonetheless a surprise, not to say a thunderclap. Herbert Diess, the boss as emblematic as they are controversial with Volkswagen (VW), will leave his duties on 1 er September, announced the German car giant at the end of a meeting of his Supervisory Board, Friday July 22. 63 years old, Mr. Diess will be successor Oliver Blume, 54, the current Chairman of the Porsche Management Board, one of the twelve brands of the VW group.
The press release announcing the departure of Mr. Diess may specify that he was decided “by mutual agreement”, the formula must not be an illusion. Arrived at the head of VW in the spring of 2018, this man renowned for his brittle speech and his rough management had been on the hot seat for over two years.
“Break the old stuck structures”
In June 2020, he had already saved his post after having had to apologize for having accused some members of the supervisory board of having “illegally” leaned information in the press. Six months later, he had put the group in turmoil by publishing a long platform on the LinkedIn social network under the title: “This is how we change Volkswagen.” In this text in vitriol, he deplored in particular to have Not succeeded in “breaking the old stuck structures” of the company, “in particular at the group’s headquarters, in Wolfsburg” (Basse-Saxe). The charge had been particularly little appreciated by the very powerful “Betriebsrat”, the group’s employee committee, controlled by the Ig Metall union.
A new storm had broken out in September 2021 when, at a meeting of the supervisory board, Mr. Diess had suggested that there were 30,000 extra jobs in the group, which has 660,000 in the world, including about half in Germany. Faced with the emotion aroused by his words, he had to specify that it was only an “extreme scenario”, in the event that the company does not succeed in completing its transformation to electric and digital, Main mission for which this former BMW was chosen to lead the Volkswagen brand in 2015, then the group, three years later.
Always in the fall of 2021, his image had further degraded when he had announced that he would not participate in a staff meeting to go to an appointment with investors in the United States. If he had finally backtracked, this episode had contributed a little more to degrade his relations with the essential committee of employees and their new president, Daniela Cavallo, first woman named to this highly strategic, in office since the spring of 2021
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