Delphi’s Steve Miller Publishes Memoir, Turnaround Lesson Book
February 19, 2008

The turnaround of Delphi Corp. is far from complete. The latest chapter in that  saga came last week when the banks were unable to find funding that would allow the nation’s largest auto-parts supplier to emerge from bankruptcy.

Nevertheless, Delphi executive chairman Robert S. “Steve” Miller, a former Chrysler executive and a veteran of a dozen turnarounds, has written a book, The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies (Collins, $25.95, 272 pages). It is due out in April.

Fortune magazine’s Editor-at-Large Allan Sloan reviewed the book in an article picked up Tuesday by the Washington Post, entitled “Self-Portrait of a Turnaround Artist.”

Sloan said he got hooked immediately on the book, not only because the autobiography talks about Miller’s 30 years of corporate troubleshooting but more because it shows him to be a human being, “a business man in full” and “not a calculator with legs.”

Sloan acknowledges Miller, now 66 years old, became a symbol of excess as he took a huge signing bonus to take over the ailing Delphi, which went into bankruptcy three months later. Miller, shortly after taking the Delphi CEO job, had vowed to this AutoObserver writer in an interview that he would avoid Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings because of the high cost. Nevertheless, in October 2005, Delphi filed for bankruptcy owing creditors more than $22.2 billion.

In January, as Delphi seemed close to coming out of bankruptcy after nearly three years, a judge cut by 80 percent the pay package Miller and other Delphi execs would receive after the parts supplier emerged from its prolonged bankruptcy.

Now, in the latest turn of events, Delphi, unable to find funding elsewhere, has turned to its former parent, General Motors, to help with the $6.1 billion loan it needs to get out of bankruptcy.

Far from Perfect
Sloan writes that the business parts of the autobiography show Miller, who launched his career as a turnaround expert after joining Chrysler in 1979, not pretending to be perfect. In the book he discusses mistakes he made at Waste Management and Federal-Mogul, and deals where he couldn't get much done (Olympia & York, Reliance Group).

“He dishes on people who've annoyed him, most prominently Lee Iacocca, with whom Miller had a 1992 run-in that cost him a chance to become Chrysler's chief executive. He gave Iacocca a famous (in Detroit) letter detailing what he considered Iacocca's flaws and mistakes. How could he risk his job that way? His answer: Being a wealthy heir (Oregon timber) was a big help. How many people would admit that?” writes Sloan.

Businessman in Full
But Sloan was more intrigued by Miller’s personal life. “The book's prologue, about the 2006 death of Miller's wife of 39 years, Maggie, is so emotional that it's almost painful to read,” writes Sloan. Miller writes Maggie initiated him into sex “on a mat on the floor of her living room” when he was a 24-year-old law student and she was livng in an apartment across the hall. Later, he explains, "I decided to let a pregnancy happen and used it to justify a courthouse marriage." 

He writes that otherwise, he felt his family and friends would never have accepted her as his wife because she was a single mother and was older than he was. "I had underestimated everyone, including myself, and chose a path I would regret ever after," writes Miller, to which Sloan says: “Hello? When's the last time you read something like that in a business book?”

Sloan reports Miller told Maggie he'd leave her out of the book, but she died before Miller and his collaborator, Michael D'Antonio, produced their manuscript. “So, with Miller's wound still raw, they wrote her in.”

Sloan concludes Miller has told friends he would have written that part differently, a change Sloan is glad he didn’t make because it allows the reader to see a businessman in full.

The review doesn’t mention — and Miller likely didn’t either in his book, apparently — his recent marriage in a lavish wedding that has been the talk of Detroit.

Photo by Delphi

Posted by Michelle Krebs at 11:55 AM under Chrysler , Commentary , Companies , Personalities | Comments (0) | digg this | Seed Newsvine