Activist Thursday (Part Two)…
So Carl Icahn just spoke at the World Business Forum and the insta-review, judging by the chatter in the ladies’ room, was that it was interesting, but contained “no content”. Still, these women said they’d be happy to have Icahn at their dinner party. Then again, this doesn’t seem like the type of crowd that knows its way around a 13-D.
While it’s true that Icahn didn’t divulge any secrets and spent a fair amount of time sharing old war stories from the 80s — American Can, Texaco, and other ghosts — and an almost equal amount of time putting on various accents — an Oklahoma lawyer, a Jewish man from Dallas, and a billionaire from Australia were among the accents he adopted to tell his stories — he did have something in common with Breeden in terms of his view of American companies:
“There’s no accountability. In many cases, there’s tremendous, tremendous waste. There’s so much waste in our management systems that when a guy like me goes in, there’s very few companies where I can’t go in and replace the CEO and save 30% on costs.”
Icahn also had a book recommendation: Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier.
RSS
November 4th, 2007 at 5:45 am
It galls me to unbelievable proportions whenever I read comments made by investors regarding the poor management performance of companies. These investor comments remind me of the Late Larry Tisch and what he did at the Tiffany Network when he took over.
What kills many businesses isn’t their gloated overhead budgets, but their inability or lackadaisical approach to challenging the competition, investing in new products and markets, and overall execution of strategy. It could be that Carl Ichan focuses this comment on companies that manufacture commodity products like cooking oil or table salt. But for most businesses, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
It is precisely this reason why most turnarounds don’t work out. Take Chrysler LLC as a case in point. They’ve brought in Nardelli and what he looked at first and foremost was the cost of sales line on the P&L — not revenue item. He probably looked at the slow inventory turnover and figured that he could eliminate slow-moving brands, etc. These are all ephemeral palliatives. Unions suck, but Korea has unionized employees, and their cars continue to make inroads. My point isn’t that costs aren’t a problem at Chrysler. My point is that even though costs are put into check, Chrysler will still be in deep trouble because it’s business model of making 2nd rate cars, with 2nd rate engineering, needs to be revamped to one that makes 1st class cars, with 1st rate engineering. In sum they need a paradigm shift, and that will be a lot harder to execute. Perhaps as a private company they’ll get the job done.
But the point is that it’s not that simple to heap blame on corporations by saying that 30% fat is always present.