Nardelli will lead the company as it searches for a new CEO, a search that will include candidates from within and outside NewPage.
Nardelli also continues to serve as CEO of Cerberus Operating and Advisory Co., an affiliate of buyout firm Cerberus Capital Management, NewPage’s controlling stockholder.
“Cerberus strongly supports the actions Bob Nardelli and the NewPage board of directors are taking for the future of the company,” a Cerberus spokeswoman said Tuesday, June 15.
What kind of leader is Nardelli?
“That depends on what part of his career you’re looking at,” said Nell Minow, editor and co-founder of the Corporate Library, an independent corporate research firm. “He did a very, very fine job at GE.”
On the other hand, Minow called his tenure at Home Depot “catastrophic.”
Nardelli spent the bulk of his career with General Electric, where he was a protege of former CEO Jack Welch. When Welch chose Jeff Immelt to lead GE, Nardelli left to become head of Home Depot from 2000 to 2007 and Chrysler from 2007 until the spring of 2009.
Nardelli joined Home Depot after it experienced explosive growth. As CEO, he was unable to maintain that growth and the price of Home Depot stock stalled, while the stock of chief competitor Lowe’s climbed. That angered Home Depot investors.
They became more angry when Nardelli replaced experienced salespeople with lower-paid, less-experienced part-time help in a cost-cutting move that ultimately hurt profits. Nardelli was forced out after he “refused to take questions during a shareholder meeting in May 2006 as the stock was floundering,” as Fortune magazine put it. He walked away with a $200 million severance package.
Eight months later, Nardelli became chairman and CEO of Chrysler, which had been taken private by Cerberus. But Chrysler declared bankruptcy, and in 2009, the company was merged with Fiat, the Italian carmaker. Nardelli left Chrysler in the merger.
He was ranked No. 17 on Portfolio.com’s 2009 list of the “worst American CEOs of all time.”
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