The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies

276 Pages·2008·1.72 MB·English

by  Steve Miller

THE
TURNAROUND
KID
What I Learned
Rescuing America’s Most
Troubled Companies
Steve Miller
This book is dedicated
to the memory of
Maggie Miller
(1937–2006).
For forty years she was both my mentor and my tormentor.
At times she warmed my heart, and at times she gave me heartburn.
No one ever brought me more joy or more grief.
And if I had it to do all over again,
I’d do it all over again.
CONTENTS

Prologue: August 11, 2006 v
1 Family, Values, Maggie, and Me 1
2 The Hard Part Starts Now 25
3 A Reluctant Bean Counter 55
4 The Black Letter 85
5 I’m a New York Banker, Sort of, Briefl y 101
6 Ma tchmaker 119
7 A Long, Slow Recovery 137
8 Executives Behaving Badly 149
9 Who’s in Charge Here? 171
Photographic Insert
10 Steel Driving Man 183
11 M otown Maelstrom 201
Postscript 233
Acknowledgments 241
Index 243
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE: AUGUST 11, 2006

I
t was past midnight as I drove through the deserted streets of subur-
ban Detroit. My plane from New York had been delayed for hours by
thunderstorms. I was exhausted from two long days of negotiations
with lawyers and representatives of General Motors and the creditors
and stockholders of the bankrupt Delphi Corporation. The latest in
my string of complex industrial rescue missions, Delphi, a $27 billion
global auto parts company with 180,000 workers, was my responsibil-
ity.
The talks had been torturous and frustrating. Normally, the details
would be swimming in my head and I’d be eager to get home to share
them with my wife, Maggie. Instead, nothing of what was discussed in
New York was on my mind as I sped past darkened houses and com-
mercial strips. I wasn’t headed for home. I was driving to the sprawling
complex of Beaumont Hospital, where Maggie lay dying of glioblas-
toma, an incurable brain cancer.
After parking my car in the hospital lot, I wound my way through
the corridors and then took an elevator to the hospice floor. I pushed
open the door to her room. The darkened space was washed with an
eerie green glow from the lighting outside. There was no movement or
sound. In the shadows I saw our eldest son, Chris, at Maggie’s bed-
side, holding her hand as he had done all night, every night, for the
past six days.
vi Prologue
“She’s gone,” he whispered.
She had stopped breathing twenty minutes before. The way she
looked, lying still with her mouth open, made it seem that she was as
surprised as I was by this turn of events.
Although I had known this moment was coming ever since Maggie’s
condition had been diagnosed in late May, I was stunned. As I sat
down, I was flooded with emotions. I was angry, mostly with the
weather gods who had denied me one last moment with Maggie while
she still lived. I was also relieved that the nightmare of the past three
months, watching her slip away, was finally over with. And I felt that
strange, hollow sensation that comes with such an enormous loss.
Maggie, who had been my mentor, and occasional tormentor, for as
long as I could remember, was gone.
Chris got up and left us alone. I told Maggie I loved her and would
miss her. I leaned over and kissed her and held her hand. She was still
warm to the touch.
It was another ten minutes before a young doctor arrived and per-
functorily pronounced her deceased, and began filling out the paper-
work. After the doctor came the chaplain, a cheerful and rotund fellow
who said all the right things about life and love and family and death.
Then he held hands with us in a circle next to the bed for a word of
prayer.
At the nurses’ station, they had all the paperwork ready to go. Two
months earlier, Maggie, always the consummate planner, had insisted
I go to a funeral home and get everything set. Also being a consum-
mate skinflint in some ways, she had insisted on a simple cremation,
no fancy casket, no memorial serv ice. I had no intention of defying
her last wishes in this regard, so I signed the papers, made sure Mag-
gie’s body was going to the right place, and then left with Chris.
Chris would spend the next eighteen hours in his hotel room,
recovering from near exhaustion. I returned to the apartment in Troy
where Maggie and I had been living since I accepted the Delphi job a
year earlier, in July 2005. I wandered around a bit and stared at all the
touches—a picture here, a potted plant there—that she had added to
make the sterile rooms our home away from home. Then, over-
Prologue vii
whelmed with fatigue, I crawled into our massive bed. Maggie had
been my bed mate for more than forty years. We had held each other
and cried in this bed after getting her prognosis. Now it felt like the
emptiest place in the world.
After a few hours of sleep I arose and dressed and went to pick up
our youngest son, Alexander, at a nearby hotel. Still in shock, and oc-
casionally in tears, I was trying to grasp the notion of being a widower.
Chris needed time to himself, so Alexander and I went to the funeral
home as they were opening for the day and completed the arrange-
ments for Maggie’s cremation later that same afternoon.
Because I was the CEO of one of the nation’s major corporations,
one that was going through a widely publicized bankruptcy restructur-
ing, Maggie’s death would be news. At her insistence we had told
almost no one of her condition, so her passing was going to come as a
shock. I had a lot of calls to make, and I needed to take some time
with details such as death notices and obituaries. I went into the
office to work on these tasks, and was immediately and almost ab-
surdly reminded that in the midst of my personal grief, which felt so
enormous and all-consuming, the world continued to turn and the
demands of my professional life were not going to let up.
For weeks a militant union group called Soldiers of Solidarity had
been planning to picket Delphi headquarters, and this was the day.
And so it was that on this brilliantly sunny morning scores of protest-
ers from Delphi operations all over the state of Michigan arrived at the
entry to our complex and rallied in full view from my office window to
show their disgust at the company and at me personally. They chanted
slogans, marched on the sidewalk, and carried placards saying things
like:
REPLACE DELPHI BOARD OF DERELICTS
DELPHI COOKS THE BOOKS—WORKERS GET BURNED
SAVE PENSIONS—JAIL FRAUDS
READY TO STRIKE
My personal favorite was a sign belittling my decision to accept a
salary of just one dollar a year during a restructuring that was going to
cost thousands of workers their jobs. It read:
viii Prologue
MILLER ISN’T WORTH A BUCK
Even in this dark hour, I could appreciate the life-goes-on irony of
the moment and the wit behind the signs. Karen Healy, one of Del-
phi’s top officers, wasn’t so calm. She marched outside to confront the
protesters and told them that they might want to reconsider their
demonstration out of respect for Maggie’s death. There was a moment
of awkward silence, and then a sharp rebuttal. Workers die all the
time, they said. The pickets stayed and were in full voice as I departed
for the funeral home in midafternoon.
Alexander and I went to view Maggie prior to her cremation. (Chris
was not ready to confront this kind of reality.) The viewing room was
big enough for thirty or forty chairs, but Maggie was an intensely pri-
vate person, and fittingly, Alexander and I were the only visitors. We
each had a few minutes alone with Maggie, who looked peaceful in her
favorite Lanz nightgown, the red-and-white one decorated with images
of little dogs. She also wore her only watch, a twelve-dollar special with
the Coos & Deschutes logo of our model railroad on its face. With her
in the casket were an elaborate origami crane from our third son,
Robin, and a handmade card from our only granddaughter, Weston.
As I stood beside Maggie I recalled that my father had said it was
important to touch the dead so that we can absorb the fi nality of their
passing. I leaned over to kiss her good-bye and touch her hand. She
was cold and waxlike. My father was right. In this moment I knew she
was really gone.
We followed the hearse that took her to the crematorium, a grace-
ful white marble building in the middle of a beautiful cemetery. Once
Maggie’s casket was placed in the cremation oven, the attendant
closed the huge and dignified brass doors that shut it off from view.
Alexander went with the man in charge and personally activated the
control to start the burning. We stayed for a while and talked about
what was happening, but there wasn’t anything further to see.
When I was back at my apartment, the phone rang. It was New
York’s governor, George Pataki, calling to express condolences. I
thanked him and in the almost-awkward silence chatted a bit about
work. I told him we were committed to keeping open our two big op-
erations in New York, at Rochester and Buffalo. He thanked me for