"In 2004, when you were first introduced to the auto industry, a lot of people were thinking, 'Who the hell is this guy?' Right? I was one of them, frankly," Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas told Marchionne during FCA's Jan. 25 quarterly call with analysts. "We hadn't seen anything like you. You took $2 billion, roughly, and you've turned it into around $72 billion, and more important than that, there are many hundreds of thousands of families across many nations that are better off because of you and your team."
In May 2014, as Marchionne launched a five-year business plan for the combined Fiat and Chrysler, Automotive News graded his first five years atop the formerly bankrupt Chrysler. Marchionne received a composite grade of B+, and he objected, albeit tongue-in-cheek, that the grade was too low during a press conference after the daylong rollout of the 2014-18 business plan.
FCA plans to reveal its 2018-22 business plan June 1 in Balocco, Italy, outside Fiat's historic home in Turin. The site and date have a nostalgic double meaning: Marchionne became CEO of Fiat on June 1, 2004, and Balocco was where he laid out his first five-year business plan for the company. Marchionne said last month that the 2018-22 plan would be carried out by his successor, whose identity would be revealed by the FCA board sometime after the presentation.
So how best to judge the 65-year-old Marchionne's nearly 15 years as CEO of Fiat? Is it by the wealth he's created for shareholders, as Jonas did? Or by the results Marchionne continues to produce from what has grown into FCA, Ferrari and CNH Industrial, whose combined value Bloomberg estimated at about $80 billion?
Either way, the numbers don't properly tell the why and the how of an iconoclast who may not have fundamentally transformed the auto industry as he wanted to, but at least saved a good piece of it. Marchionne declined a request for an interview for this article, so perhaps the best way to judge is to look closely at what he got right and what he got wrong, with the help of his own words.
After all, as Marchionne told graduates of the University of Toledo in May 2011: "People who see only themselves are destined to remain trapped alone within the fragile two-dimensional image of a looking glass. What a person has done during his life should not be measured by what he has achieved for himself, but rather by what he has left behind for others."
 | Recognizing value |
Let's start with Marchionne's bargain of the century: acquiring control of bankrupt Chrysler in 2009 for pennies on the dollar. Nearly a decade on, it's easy to forget that Marchionne agreed to take over Chrysler after virtually everyone else said no, largely because he recognized the global potential of Jeep. Jeep and Ram were the "crown jewels" of Chrysler, Marchionne said, and they needed to be shared with the rest of the world. Under different financial circumstances, that might have happened quicker. But because of Fiat and Chrysler's hobbled finances, it required time.
"What I found was ... a company that had been run by a foreign entity for a long period of time, that had taken all of its wares on the way out. In 2006-2007, it had been flipped over to financially competent — but industrially incompetent — private equity investors who had run it for a period of time and then run into a brick wall in a crisis. What we ended up looking at [when Fiat arrived] was empty cupboards in terms of technology and product. And so we started from scratch." — Marchionne at Brookings Institution, May 2014
 | Letting products age |
Within months of taking control of Chrysler, Marchionne met with its dealers in Las Vegas. There, he made the first of what he called "a promise for a promise" — namely, that the automaker would commit to invest in and improve its products if dealers would agree to invest in their stores and improve their business practices with the public. Marchionne has since renewed this promise and did invest in FCA's lineup, especially early on. But the pace of product renewal has steadily slowed. The Dodge Journey, Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, among other vehicles, still ride on platforms from the DaimlerChrysler era. Promised luxury SUVs, the Jeep Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer, have been delayed. The Dodge Grand Caravan, long scheduled to die, was re-engineered and placed back into extended sales service in 2017 because no affordable substitute had been developed to protect the value of the Chrysler Pacifica.
"The problem with us is that we like hanging onto old cars, like the Journey, you know, a successful car. Investing in the next architecture of the Journey is costly — coming up with another car that sells today." — unpublished portion of Marchionne interview with Automotive News, August 2015