Klaus Kleinfeld
Encyclopedia : K : KL : KLA : Klaus Kleinfeld
Klaus Christian Kleinfeld (born November 6 1957 in Bremen, Germany) is a German manager and has been President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Siemens AG since 2005.
Kleinfeld received a master’s degree in business administration and economics from Georg August University in Goettingen (Germany), followed by a doctorate from Julius Maximilian University in Wuerzburg (Germany). His doctoral dissertation was entitled “The Corporate Identity Concept from the Perspective of Strategic Company Management.” In 1982, he began work as a research assistant at the Institute of the Foundation for Empirical Social Research in Nuremberg (Germany). In 1986, he joined Ciba-Geigy in Basel (Switzerland), where he was a strategic product manager for two pharmaceutical segments.
Kleinfeld has worked for Siemens AG since 1987. His first position was in the company’s Corporate Sales and Marketing unit. He subsequently founded and led Siemens Management Consulting (SMS), an organization formed to develop and oversee corporate revitalization and business improvement programs. Under his leadership, SMC became a highly profitable and respected consulting business that established cutting-edge practices in benchmarking, business re-engineering and innovation within the company. Kleinfeld personally led projects for a number of global Siemens operating groups, including wireless communications, industry automation and power generation. He was also a key architect of Siemens’ top+ program, a company-wide initiative to improve performance and competitiveness. In 1998, he transferred to Siemens’ Medical Engineering Group (Med), where he headed the company’s worldwide angiography, fluoroscopy and X-ray systems business. In April 2000, he was appointed to Med’s managing board.
In January 2001, Kleinfeld moved to the United States, where he served first as Chief Operating Officer (COO) and then – from 2002 to 2004 – as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Siemens USA, which has 65,000 employees and a business volume of some US$17 billion. From Siemens headquarters in New York City, he headed and successfully restructured the company’s U.S. activities, which offer products, systems and solutions in the medical, power generation and distribution, automation and control, lighting, information and communications, transportation and building technologies sectors. Kleinfeld has been a member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG since December 2002.
In January 2004, Klaus Kleinfeld was appointed to Siemens’ Corporate Executive Committee, where, for several months, he had special responsibility for the company’s Information and Communications business area as well as Siemens’ regional companies in Africa, the Middle East, Russia and the other countries of the C.I.S. He also headed Siemens’ corporate strategy department. Kleinfeld relinquished these responsibilities in the middle of 2004, when he was appointed Vice President of Siemens AG.
Kleinfeld assumed the position of President and Chief Executive Officer of Siemens AG on January 27, 2005, succeeding the company’s long-serving CEO, Dr. Heinrich von Pierer. He is the 11th company head in Siemens’ 159-year history. Under his leadership, Siemens’ mobile handset business, an arm of the company’s struggling Communications Group, was sold (for a negative charge) to Taiwan’s BenQ in June 2005. This move marked the end of Siemens’ activities in the consumer mobile phone market.
Kleinfeld is a member of the board of directors of Alcoa Inc., of Bayer AG and of Citigroup Inc. He also serves as a director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and belongs to the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.
Kleinfeld, who is married and has two daughters, is considered to be a performance-oriented, pragmatic and socially concerned manager and an excellent communicator. He is also an active sportsman and runs in the New York Marathon every year.
Publications
Corporate Identity und strategische Unternehmensführung, Akademie-Verlag München 1994, ISBN 3-929115-16-6External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.