Setting A New Course

Dec. 21, 2004

Lindahl's 'master plan' took ABB in a new direction.

In late 1996, when he knew he would be succeeding European management legend Percy Barnevik as president and CEO of the Zurich-based ABB Group, Gran Lindahl began to think about the company's responsibilities to customers, shareholders, employees, and society. He wanted to determine what was "right" for the business, he says. "I made what I would call a master plan of what would be the ideal direction on various issues," Lindahl recalls. The result was a four-year, deliberately directed repositioning of ABB. From Jan. 1, 1997, when he succeeded Barnevik, until this past Dec. 31, when Jrgen Centerman succeeded him as president and chief executive, Lindahl moved US$24.7 billion ABB away from power generation and other heavy-industry sectors to higher-profit, technology-intensive business segments, such as industrial control systems, as well as to financial and other services. In the process of succeeding a manufacturing CEO legend Lindahl learned some very valuable lessons. "We have basically no training in how to address journalists or the market at large, the investors and others," he confesses. "I learned very quickly that, most of all, you have to be very consistent . . . and the best way to be consistent is to always go back to some kind of facts." And speaking of facts, another lesson Lindahl mentions is the importance of acting quickly once the facts are clear. His example: the Asian economic crisis that began in mid-1997 with the collapse of Thailand's currency. "Very few people, including myself, had any sort of expectation that would come." However, once the crisis was apparent, he and his management team had to recognize it was real and "act immediately," says Lindahl. In a strategy that surprised analysts and investors at the time, ABB intensified its activities in southeast Asia to take advantage of lower-cost sources of supply.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.