There is little at the office to distract staffers from the business at hand—almost no art on the walls, no fancy woodwork. “It’s not a place you bring clients to impress them,” says a former employee, who adds that those in the satellite offices refer to headquarters as the Death Star. The unadorned office is an extension of Feinberg’s personality. He is almost pathologically self-effacing. When Price joined in 2001, the firm’s headquarters were so crowded that Feinberg offered to share his office with him. When Price’s phone rang, Feinberg would take a message, never bothering to introduce himself. “He hates big egos,” another former employee says. “His ego is having no ego.”

Cerberus’ private equity team meets every Monday evening. Somewhere between 50 and 60 people gather in a large conference room; another 40 or so call in. The team runs through various deals, with the key executives involved with each talking about challenges and opportunities. Feinberg doesn’t guide the meeting as much as ask leading questions. When one executive has a problem, Feinberg will call on others to discuss how they dealt with a similar issue.

Cerberus does its own research rather than farming it out to a consultant such as McKinsey & Co. or Bain & Co., as is typical for private equity firms. At Cerberus, this do-it-yourself, demanding, labor-intensive approach is bred in the bone. Many of the 300 people doing the everyday work have been plucked from the ranks of unlikely industries, such as telecom and packaged goods. Feinberg seeks out those with hidden talent and, says a competitor, wants them hungry to move up the socio­economic ladder: “You look at these people, and they don’t look like Wall Street blue bloods.”

Feinberg has also tossed out Wall Street’s typical hierarchy. “Everyone talks to everyone,” Price says. “There’s no chain of command. It’s absurd to think you’d have to talk to your supervisor—if you could figure out who your supervisor is—about whether you could go see Steve about something. If you needed Steve’s help, you’d be expected to talk to him.”

When Cerberus pulls the trigger on a new purchase, it executes a detailed 100-day plan. “In every deal, there’s always a honeymoon period,” Grant Gregory, a Cerberus operations executive and the former head of what is now Deloitte & Touche U.S.A., explains to investors at the annual meeting. “You can do a lot in those first months.” Of course, it’s not necessarily a honeymoon if you’re on the other side. Cerberus reassesses all employees of the company it’s buying and, according to Gregory, their compensation. Cerberus’ transactions are rarely hostile; it tries to work with management. But once Cerberus is in, it doesn’t hesitate to start slicing. In late November, Feinberg bought a 51 percent stake in G.M. finance arm GMAC. By June, he had replaced or shifted the jobs of more than half of the top 19 executives at the company’s ailing residential-lending group. These changes included installing a new C.E.O. and a new head of U.S. operations, cherry-picked from a different company in Cerberus’ portfolio.

Sometimes Feinberg doesn’t wait that long. In the spring of 2006, Jeffry Bust, the C.E.O. of Blue Bird, a manufacturer known for building school buses, approached Cerberus about being acquired. When Blue Bird was sold in August 2006 for $165 million, Bust put out a press release calling the acquisition a “significant step forward” for his company. A couple weeks later, he was unemployed. “They didn’t really have a place for me that was attractive,” says Bust, now an executive at a chemical firm. Feinberg never visited Blue Bird headquarters in Fort Valley, Georgia, and never even met with Bust.

Fixing a broken management team is just one of Feinberg’s techniques. The bulk of the work goes into “blocking and tackling,” as Feinberg puts it—cutting expenses, expanding product lines, changing prices, and finding ways to bring in partners. Cerberus bristles at accusations that it’s quick to sell assets. “We’re long-term partners, not ‘strippers and flippers,’ as it’s called in the press,” Mark Neporent, Cerberus’ chief operating officer, says at the annual meeting. Tim Price later adds, “We’re more like a conglomerate in a way. Instead of find, fix, and flip, it’s find, fix, and hold.”