Martina Merz’s office in the glass head office of ThyssenKrupp in Essen contains few things. On the standing desk is a small replica of The Thinker from Rodin. A symbol, Merz believes, of the effort that thinking can sometimes be. On the wall hangs a photo montage that she got from the staff. It shows Merz in a steelworker outfit. Above that is a pun: “Girls belong behind the oven.”
The editing, noticed by a journalist from the German magazine Manager Magazine, is a very ironic wink. Martina Merz (1963) is considered the most powerful woman in German industry. Since she made a remarkable transfer from the supervisory board in 2019, she has led industrial group ThyssenKrupp (2021: more than 101,000 employees, turnover of 39.6 billion euros). No woman in Germany runs a company that has more staff.
Her job is known for being particularly difficult – the phrase ‘Mission Impossible of the Ruhr’ has cropped up in German media occasionally. ThyssenKrupp, active in sectors ranging from steel production to hydrogen technology, has been in bad shape for years, regularly makes losses, is cumbersome and unclear and has significant debts. While conglomerates such as Siemens, Philips and General Electric previously split up successfully in search of more focus and return, this continues to be a struggle for ThyssenKrupp. Merz’s predecessors failed to patch up the industrial group.
Merz seemed on the right track for a long time. For example, she sold the elevator division in 2020, bringing in much-needed euros 17 billion. They also split off other parts of ThyssenKrupp, such as the mining machines. It cut 8,000 jobs, two-thirds of the target. But a few weeks before the decision on her contract extension will be made – Merz will officially remain until early 2023 – there are difficult questions on the table.
The transformation is far from complete, and even threatens to stall. Merz has not yet succeeded in finding a solution for the vulnerable steel branch, which requires substantial investments. The war in Ukraine further complicates the situation. For example, who wants to buy the steel division? Merz warned in March that ThyssenKrupp sees no options for a sale for the time being. And what do the high raw material prices do to the company’s meager margins? The challenge for Merz didn’t seem to get any bigger, but it did.
Who is this woman – she says she is not an example for other women – who is trying to guide a German icon into the future?
Dirty, greasy work
Her supervisor doesn’t like it. When Martina Merz starts her studies at the technical college in Stuttgart, she wants to go into production technology. But then again, that field hardly attracts women, and it is dirty, greasy work, with oil and machine parts.
Merz continues anyway. Because in production technology you also have a lot to do with other people, and she likes that contact.
That early anecdote, recorded in a rare early interview in the Stuttgarter Zeitung in 2007, signs her. Merz’s four-decade career in German industry combines a love of technology with a talent for working with people. Plus a belief that you can do anything you want – even as a woman.
Merz, who comes from a village in southwestern Germany, starts working for industrial group Bosch after her studies – known for its washing machines, but also a producer of all kinds of car parts. First on the factory floor between the machines, but it soon becomes apparent that she has more talents.
I like working for companies that are in an existential crisis
Martina Merz CEO ThyssenKrupp
Merz is good at leadership. Before she’s thirty, in the late eighties, the factory where she works has a handful of people under her who are older than her. She then quietly works her way up within the group. In 2001, she is in charge of the division that makes car door handles – which employs 2,000 people.
Why is Merz such a good manager? Relatively little is known about her time at Bosch – she is not on top of the company and rarely appears in the public eye. Later on, however, she occasionally mentions two mottos, which provide insight into how she works. One: the best source of inspiration is the way a young mother treats her child. Namely: with her own course to which she makes no concessions and full of affection, according to the childless Merz. The second: bad managers avoid difficult topics.
In other words: Merz works hard and is steadfast, does not get carried away emotionally and keeps a sharp eye on the end goal. Even if that requires layoffs. She is cutting a lot of jobs in the door handle division. “I like working for companies that are in an existential crisis,” she will say later. “Then you can look back at the end and say: it worked.”
In 2015 Merz thinks it was nice. She had just spent three years in charge of Chassis Brakes International from Paris – a continuation of the Bosch automotive brake division that she continues to lead in sales. She likes braking, she likes to say there: a very “emotional” product. People brake differently on every continent. Aggressive in Europe, calmer in the United States.
Merz chooses a calmer life, which she fills with supervisory directorships. At Volvo, at the Belgian steel company Bekaert. And at ThyssenKrupp.
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‘Not proud’ of appointment
Merz has barely commented on the circumstances surrounding her appointment as top woman. Once she said she was “not proud” of it.
In the spring of 2019, shareholders and the supervisory board (SB) of ThyssenKrupp will be completely done with CEO Guido Kerkhoff. He does not set a clear course, it remains unclear where he wants to go with the company. A merger plan of the steel division with Tata Steel has gone awry.
But who should take over? The supervisory board is said to be polling several well-known men from the German business community, including Dutchman Marijn Dekkers, who previously led chemical group Bayer. But nobody wants to work at ThyssenKrupp. Too complicated, too high risk of failure. So Merz, chairman of the board, decides to do it himself.
The choice is remarkable. Not just from Merz herself, who suddenly leaves the intended quiet end of her managerial career for what it was. But also from the shareholders and supervisory board who agree: so far Merz has never managed more than a few thousand people.
Yet there are also clear reasons to choose Merz. She has had an impeccable management career. And ThyssenKrupp seems to need an outsider who can make hard choices.
ThyssenKrupp, steel supplier for the West German economy tree after World War II, emotion – and that seems to have sometimes stood in the way of Merz’s predecessors who made careers within the company. No one got a split off the ground. But the relatively untethered Merz doesn’t seem to be bothered by that. Selling the profitable elevator branch, in a sense the heart of the concern? You have to, the money is necessary. And yes – of course the steel branch is “identity-determining” for ThyssenKrupp, she told the Süddeutsche Zeitung† But that won’t play a role in how she runs the company. “I am a rational person.”
Simone de Beauvoir
With her appointment in 2019, it seems for a while that Merz will become the first top woman of a company in the main index of the German stock exchange. Only: just before she takes office, ThyssenKrupp drops out of that DAX.
Nevertheless, since she took office, Merz has been regarded as the most powerful woman in German industry. Not that she sees herself as an example. Because she is not married and childless, she says she gives the impression that as a woman you can only have a good career by making sacrifices in your private life.
Behind that remark is a vision in which Merz does not like to emphasize her womanhood anyway. Merz is a lover of the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, whose books she claims to have read almost all of them – except the most famous book, The second sex† She thinks that is “too feminist”, she said at the beginning of this year in a podcast from the German magazine Wirtschaftswoche† No, really inspiring is De Beauvoir’s belief that you should take your destiny into your own hands.
Merz often refers to her own mother. He fled East Prussia, which was annexed by the Russians after the war, and ended up on the other side of Germany, in the small village of Durchhausen in Baden-Württemberg. There she founded the first women’s soccer team, let her daughters go to church in pants, and married a son from a prominent village family, against the wishes of her in-laws.
As a woman you can just do whatever you want, Merz just wants to say. “In the current discussion, I still too often notice the victim role,” she told Manager Magazin in 2021. “I didn’t see myself that way. I’m not for quotas either.”
With that attitude, Merz has come a long way—to now face the ultimate challenge of her career.
Whether or not she manages to get a company out of an existential crisis this time around, at least she knows what she’s going to do next. This time really enjoy the peace. On the Vespa from village to village to Paris, where Francophile Merz still has an apartment. And where she likes to be behind the oven – to cook.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of April 13, 2022
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