V***b
发帖数: 3419 | 1 看了篇文章，挺长，标题是The Porsche Story: A Fierce Family Feud
很有意思，我贴过来，
看文章之前最好先弄弄清楚一些人之间的关系
主要人物是这几个
Ferdinand Porsche
Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche，又叫Ferry Porsche
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche，又叫Butzi Porsche
Ferdinand Piech
Anton Piech
Wolfgang Porsche
没时间看全文我就给个摘要吧：
Ferdinand Piech不是个东西，见人就踩，只顾自己往上爬，搞女人，连自己表兄的老
婆也搞，不喜欢就踹掉，最后搞出12个孩子，自己也成为家族里权力最高的人。 | V***b
发帖数: 3419 | 2 Part 1: A Fierce Family Feud
Volkswagen looks set to acquire Porsche, the troubled German sports car
manufacturer. At the core of the companies' tightly intertwined histories is
a deeply divided family engaged in a power struggle worth billions -- and
which could determine the fate of two of Germany's most famous carmakers.
In the end, the two men shook hands after all. When Ferdinand Pi?ch
encountered his rival Wendelin Wiedeking last Thursday evening at an event
to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Audi, they greeted each other
briefly.
The battle had been decided. Pi?ch had fought hard, as he enjoys doing when
something really important is at stake. "Either I'm shot dead, or I win," he
says.
This time he had faced a formidable foe: Wendelin Wiedeking, the man who had
saved Porsche and then, in the style of a true turbo-capitalist, had tried
to take over the much larger Volkswagen Group. With an annual compensation
of about 0 million ($112 million), he was Germany's highest-paid corporate
executive -- and one of its most controversial. "For many people, I am a
nightmare," Wiedeking says about himself.
Now it's time for Wiedeking to go and Porsche production chief Michael Macht
to take his place. The Porsche brand will be absorbed by the VW Group, in
which the emirate of Qatar would then also purchase a stake. But the next
set of conflicts is already taking shape.
Wiedeking himself is leading the fight for his severance package. At issue
is a sum in excess of 00 million ($140 million), an amount that will
catapult the debate over executive compensation in Germany into a new
dimension. It will likely be the largest golden parachute in the history of
German business. Ironically, it will be paid to the manager who, despite
having saved Porsche, has since maneuvered it into a crisis that almost
bankrupted the luxury carmaker.
In this discussion, some of the things the Porsche boss has said in the past
may come back to haunt him, including the statement: "You can assume that I
won't be going to the poorhouse."
A Dynastic Feud
Another ongoing conflict will also continue, namely that between the Porsche
and Pi?ch families. Wiedeking was merely a proxy in a dynastic feud of a
kind that has rarely been seen in German industry.
On one side of this conflict is the Porsche family, led by Wolfgang Porsche,
an amiable businessman who was always in the shadow of his father, engineer
Ferry Porsche, and his brother Ferdinand Porsche, and who only assumed the
chairmanship of the Porsche supervisory board at the age of 63. He is
normally the kind of man who prefers reconciliation whenever possible. He
likes to defuse tense situations by telling jokes. Wiedeking was among those
who fought on his behalf.
On the other side is the Pi?ch family, led by Ferdinand Pi?ch, who fought
his way to the top, first at Audi and later in the VW Group, battling
intrigues for decades, creating some of his own and eliminating dozens of
rivals in the process. For Pi?ch, life has been a struggle to survive since
his childhood. He once said: "When I have lost confidence in people, I
deliberately allow them to fall by the wayside."
Until now, it was always an unevenly matched battle, from which Pi?ch
usually emerged victorious.
The Porsches employed a pinprick strategy. They once characterized the Pi?
chs as the "rival family." And yet the only reason their surnames are
different was that the progenitor of the clan, Ferdinand Porsche, had a son,
Ferry, and a daughter, Louise. As a result, Ferry Porsche's children ended
up with the mythical surname Porsche, while Louise's children acquired her
husband's surname, Pi?ch.
Whenever Wolfgang Porsche wants to annoy his cousin, he refers to him as a "
non-namebearer."
The psychological games and foibles of this industrial dynasty would be
little more than laughable, if only they had remained a family matter. But
the rivals are now battling over who is to control their combined assets,
which in the future will include more than half of a merged VW-Porsche Group
. The new organization will employ 370,000 people and aims to become the
world's largest carmaker. At the same time, it will encompass two symbols of
German industrial history that are burdened with particularly strong
emotions.
On the one side is the Volkswagen Group, with its Beetle, which Hitler
planned as the "people's car" and which later became a symbol of Germany's
post-war Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle"). On the other side is
Porsche, with its 911, revered worldwide as the quintessential sports car
and a pinnacle of German engineering achievement. The myth of the Porsche
brand was even enhanced by a horrific accident: the death of the actor James
Dean in 1955, who was driving a Porsche when he died.
American comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who collects Porsches, is apt to lose his
sense of humor the minute someone drops so much as a crumb in one of the
more than 20 cars in his collection. A Porsche always makes you feel "like
you're in the future," he says. VW, on the other hand, represents the
somewhat more mundane present.
The two brands could hardly be more unlike. Porsche sells dreams, while
Volkswagen sells reality. Porsche is the glossy icon of exclusivity while
Volkswagen represents the sturdy, reliable vehicle of the masses. Luxury
versus affordability, the moneyed elite versus the new middle class, golf
aficionados versus "Generation Golf," as those who grew up in West Germany
in the 1980s have been dubbed. And all of this is to be united under one
roof in the future, and run by two deeply divided branches of the same
family? | V***b
发帖数: 3419 | 3 Part 2: Part Comedy, Part Drama
The two companies have been connected by the Porsche clan since they were
founded. Many of the elements of bitter power struggles between Porsche
managers in the southwestern city of Stuttgart and their VW counterparts in
the northern city of Wolfsburg, between the employee representatives of both
companies and even between the governors of the two German states where
their respective headquarters are located, are rooted in the history and
genes of this family.
Its history is a mirror image of German history, one in which Hitler and
forced labor played a role, as did Germany's postwar economic miracle and,
more recently, Anglo-American-style capitalism. It was with methods more
typical of a hedge fund than a small sports car manufacturer that Porsche
embarked on a campaign, beginning in 2005, to acquire the VW Group, a
company 15 times its size.
The family clan behind the takeover effort has had decades of experience in
an ongoing feud -- a struggle that revolves around power and billions, as
well as strong emotions, minor humiliations and, in some cases, women.
The entire affair is bizarre and amusing, part comedy and part drama. But
the conflicts within the Porsche clan also demonstrate that the kind of
family businesses which play a key role in the German economy are not always
entirely a good thing. They can, admittedly, have a stronger long-term
orientation than publicly traded corporations, which are forced to
distribute profits as quickly as possible. But they can also descend into
chaos when their owners devote too much time to their own affairs, to the
detriment of the companies themselves.
In the case of Porsche, each side has already inflicted so many wounds on
the other that a rational discussion between the two is hardly feasible
anymore. And even if the two families have now come to an agreement over the
future of the merged organization, the VW-Porsche Group and its employees
can expect something of a bumpy ride in the months to come.
That, at any rate, is the lesson to be learned from the history of the
Porsche family's two main businesses: the sports car manufacturer in
Stuttgart and the dealership network based in Salzburg, Austria.
Ferdinand Porsche had once divided his estate into these two companies, with
his son Ferry at the helm in Stuttgart and his daughter, Louise Pi?ch, in
control of the dealership company in Salzburg.
The history of the two Porsche companies must seem deeply ironic to the
employees and shareholders of Volkswagen. For decades, the Stuttgart and
Salzburg businesses were only able to grow into corporations with billions
in sales because they cooperated with -- and benefited from -- the VW Group.
And then, when Porsche had accumulated enough capital, it tried to take
over the Wolfsburg-based giant.
"We fed two little monsters," comments one VW executive. "And now they want
to devour us."
A Fight to Survive
Ferry Porsche laid the foundations for those later developments on Sept. 17,
1948. At the time, Beetles were being built again at the Volkswagen plant
in Wolfsburg under the supervision of the British, who were then in control
of the state of Lower Saxony where Wolfsburg is located. This was strictly
speaking illegal, because the Porsche design firm, Porsche Konstruktionen
GmbH, still held the patents for the model.
Heinz Nordhoff, VW's managing director, met with Ferry Porsche and Anton Pi?
ch in the Bavarian town of Bad Reichenhall to establish a proper basis for
relations between the two companies. The representatives of the Porsche-Pi?
ch clan came to an agreement on three issues:
?Porsche would receive a licensing fee of five German marks for each Beetle
produced up until the end of 1954. This provided the company with fresh
capital.
?The Volkswagen plant was required to supply Porsche with the parts it would
need for its planned automobile production plants. This enabled the
Stuttgart-based company to build its own sports cars, despite having few
employees and small production facilities.
?Porsche became the authorized dealer for VW models in Austria, establishing
the foundation for a commercial enterprise that now sells cars from almost
all the VW Group's brands and has annual sales of 3 billion ($18.5 billion
).
Since their founding, the companies have been plagued by disputes between
the Porsche and Pi?ch families, which are divided by more than just their
names. The families are fundamentally different in their mentalities and
even in their approaches to raising children.
Louise and Anton Pi?ch sent their children to a boarding school. Ferdinand
Pi?ch describes it as a "typical boarding school experience, meant to
toughen you up -- elitist, Spartan and strict." He had to fight and struggle
to survive. According to Pi?ch, who would eventually become head of VW, the
experience left him with "an extremely strong mistrust of others" and the
realization that many things "can only be achieved by doing them yourself,
because you can't rely on others."
Ferry Porsche, on the other hand, sent his four sons to alternative Waldorf
schools. Their education was based on the principles of the Austrian thinker
Rudolf Steiner, who founded the spiritual movement known as Anthroposophy:
"Receive the children in reverence, educate them with love and send them
forth in freedom." A member of the Pi?ch clan derisively characterizes the
educational emphasis in the Porsche family as "crafts, crocheting and
singing." | V***b
发帖数: 3419 | 4 Part 3: 'We Have a Few Percent More than You'
Nevertheless, the Pi?chs long benefited from the fruits of this upbringing.
Whenever there were conflicts, the Porsches consistently sought compromise
or simply gave in. But this approach had ceased to work by the early 1970s,
when sharp differences developed among the four descendants of the families
who were working at Porsche: designer Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, who had
designed the successful 911, production chief Hans-Peter Porsche,
distribution chief Hans Michel Pi?ch and R&D chief Ferdinand Pi?ch.
The conflict began with Ferdinand Pi?ch, who had backed the extremely costly
development of the Porsche 917 racecar. His approach at the time was the
same one he would apply in his subsequent career at Audi and VW: He insisted
on the best technology possible, at any cost. The others accused him of
wasting money, while he in turn scoffed that, in a family business, one's
career can suffer a setback "if you don't say a proper hello to a family
member at breakfast."
'We Quarreled Terribly'
In 1970, Ferry Porsche summoned the family members to take part in group
therapy at Schüttgut, a farm in the Austrian town of Zell am See where he
and his sister Louise Pi?ch had taken their children during World War II. He
hoped that the building alone, as well as the memories of their shared
childhood experience, would have a calming effect on the rebellious
offspring.
But the outcome of the gathering was not what he had expected. "We quarreled
terribly," says Ferdinand Pi?ch. The family decided that none of its
members would work at Porsche in the future, and that outside managers would
run the company.
Since then, most of the family members have only played within the auto
industry the role of relatively invisible Porsche owners, but no longer as
active managers. However, for Ferdinand Pi?ch, the changes jump-started his
career, which first led to the top post at Audi and then to the chairmanship
of the VW Group.
The fact that Pi?ch became the central divisive figure in the family early
on was partly attributable to his turbulent private life, which is reflected
in numbers: He has 12 children from four different relationships.
He was first married during his student years, and that marriage produced
five children. In 1972, he had an affair with, of all people, Marlene
Porsche, the wife of his cousin, Gerd Porsche. The transgression turned the
Porsche clan against the Pi?ch scion. The Porsches objected to the affair,
partly on moral grounds, but also because it upset the carefully balanced
equilibrium between the two families.
The estate of Ferdinand Porsche had been equally divided between the
Porsches and the Pi?chs. Ferry Porsche and his four children each had a 10-
percent share of the sports car manufacturer and the dealership organization
. His sister Louise Pi?ch and her four children also owned 10 percent each.
But when Marlene Porsche divorced Gerd Porsche, he was forced to relinquish
a portion of his share to her.
This led some members of the family to accuse Ferdinand Pi?ch of trying to
secure a larger share in the company through his liaison with Marlene. Pi?ch
says: "For that reason alone, marriage would never have been an option for
me."
Creative Energy
Ferdinand Pi?ch lived "more or less together" with Marlene for 12 years,
during which he fathered two children with her -- and two more with another
woman. "I can identify with both the ascetic and the oriental way of life,"
he later said, commenting on his lifestyle. "At any rate, I know that I
derived my creative energy from the quieter times."
He eventually left Marlene for a nanny, Ursula Plasser, to the renewed
chagrin of the other branch of the family. Pi?ch had three children with
Plasser, and the couple is still married today.
The way he treated Marlene still enrages some members of the Porsche family
when they encounter Ferdinand Pi?ch today. His older brother Ernst also
caused his share of distress when he tried to sell his shares in the company
to Arab investors in 1983. The remaining family members had to raise close
to 100 million German marks to prevent the sale. Because the two sides of
the family split Ernst Pi?ch's shares, the Porsche side has held more than
half of the shares since then.
The incident, which the family refers as the "Ernst case," still affects
internal conflicts today. Admittedly the families have committed themselves
to voting in unison on the Porsche supervisory board and in the Salzburg-
based network of dealerships, which requires that they come to an agreement
beforehand.
However, whenever there is discord, Wolfgang Porsche is fond of reminding
the "other family" that "we have a few percent more than you." | y*******n
发帖数: 10103 | 5 保时捷也搞成外戚专权了啊。这个孙子都是不是姓保时捷的。 | a********2
发帖数: 2561 | |
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