Wendelin Wiedeking

Wendelin Wiedeking (born August 28, 1952) is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of the German car manufacturer, Porsche AG, a post he held from 1993 through July 23, 2009. He was also speaker of the company's executive committee and was a member of the supervisory board of Volkswagen AG.

Wiedeking was born in Ahlen, North Rhine-Westphalia. He grew up in Beckum, Germany, and attended RWTH in Aachen. After graduation in 1978, he remained at RWTH for graduate school, in order to attain a doctorate in engineering. He earned this degree in 1983.

His professional career began in 1983 as Director's Assistant in the Production and Materials Management area of Porsche AG in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen.

A mechanical engineer by training, he joined Porsche in 1983, aged 31. After a stint at Wiesbaden based Glyco AG, a subsidiary of auto-parts maker Federal-Mogul, he returned to Porsche as head of production in 1991, taking over two years later as Chairman (CEO) when Porsche was close to bankruptcy. Due to Porsche's large shareholding in Volkswagen, Wiedeking also found himself on the supervisory board of that company. Some industry analysts believed that Porsche could not survive on its own, but Wiedeking, who says he made his first million by the age of 30 with real estate investments, took on the challenge.

Wiedeking, then 40 years old, who with his spectacles and moustache looked like "a clerk at a venetian blinds manufacturer", according to Der Spiegel magazine, soon imposed his gung-ho management style on the workforce. Within two years he managed a surprise turnaround by trimming the product line-up, modernizing the production system based on Toyota's lean manufacturing system and negotiating new work rules with the unions.

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