Does Bob Nardelli Have the Worst Job in America?

Who loves running a shrinking, struggling Detroit automaker during a time when gas is $4 a gallon and consumers are showing little interest in buying American cars?

Bob Nardelli does, that's who.

The man that Cerberus Capital Management picked to run Chrysler after the private equity firm took it off of Daimler's hands last year has no regrets about taking the job. "I'm enjoying the hell out of myself," he said during a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

It seems that Nardelli is much more comfortable making tough decisions about downsizing, reorganizing, and innovating when he doesn't have pesky shareholders to answer to like he did as chief executive of Home Depot. Those shareholders, by the way, eventually called for his head on a platter, and that's exactly what they got.

So it was particularly fun when the Journal's Alan Murray entered the audience Q&A portion of the Nardelli session. Murray didn't want to hear from just any old audience member. He wanted to hear from someone who might be considered Nardelli's "worst nightmare."

Is there an activist investor in the house?

Indeed there was. Murray spotted Pershing Square Capital's Bill Ackman and gave him the floor. While Ackman himself never went after Home Depot (it was a similarly aggressive peer of his-- Ralph Whitworth of Relational Investors--who ultimately prevailed over Nardelli's ouster), he's waged his fair share of brutal, public attacks on chief executives.

Ackman's first reaction was not surprising. "We're not a company's worst nightmare," he said, as long as the company responds to his inquiries. Instead, he believes companies should welcome his "free ideas" on how to improve performance and they should appreciate that those ideas are coming from someone who only expects a return on his investment in exchange for the advice.

Nardelli kept his cool, but stayed brief in his response, which included some G.E.-like corporate-speak about listening. "I don't see a point of conflict between Bill and myself," he said.

And what about Chrysler, anyway. How's it doing?

Even though he was an outsider when he took Chrysler's reins last year, Nardelli seems to have picked up Detroit's reactionary way of thinking pretty quickly. Chrysler, he said multiple times, has had to "resize" based on where the market is going (and that's in the downward direction). "I can't do anything about the size of the pie," he said. "I can only do something about the size of my wedge of the pie."

Can't do anything about growing the market? The leader of one of the three big U.S. automakers essentially admitted that giving car buyers more of what they want and less of what they don't want is totally beyond his control. And Detroit wonders how it got itself into this pickle.

When Murray asked Nardelli how many U.S. automakers will remain independent companies in three years, Nardelli replied: "Well I know there will be one."

Perhaps unsure of what this meant, Murray responded: "Which one?"

Nardelli believes Chrysler will remain an independent company in three years' time.

Murray then threw the question out to the audience for vote:

Which of the big three automakers is least likely to be an independent company in three years?

The results:
43 percent Chrysler
36 percent Ford
21 percent General Motors

And Ralph Whitworth wasn't even present to cast his vote.

by Megan Barnett