The World’s Best CEOs
In the right hands, big turnarounds do happen. By Mark Gimein of The Big Money Once upon a time, there was a car company that was one of the world’s sickest. Its managers spent their time fighting one another. The…
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In the right hands, big turnarounds do happen.
By Mark Gimein of The Big Money
Once upon a time, there was a car company that was one of the world’s sickest. Its managers spent their time fighting one another. The one thing its workers did most reliably was go on strike. Its bankers debated how big a bailout would keep it out of bankruptcy.
The company was Fiat. Yes, the same Fiat that is now taking over Chrysler. What kind of shape was Fiat in? Well, back in 2000, General Motors (GM) had signed a deal to buy Fiat. Then when the deal was supposed to close, in 2005, GM decided it was hopeless. “Being forced to buy Fiat,” Business Week reported, was “GM’s nightmare scenario.” To avoid having to go through with the purchase, GM paid Fiat $2 billion just to get out of the deal. Most folks thought it was money well spent.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
