The Story of Hertz Going Bust
I am Hertz Alumni, 2011-2016. We had a great group of engineers and product people, many of us far too talented to be in company like what hertz turned into. We were under the leadership of an incredible division head and most of the folks in our group felt a deep sense of loyalty to her. Nearly all of us, including that division head, are gone now, mostly laid off. If you poll any random Hertz alumnus, the story you're likely to hear is "we had a great team and incompetent senior management."<p>To us, there is a quote in a different bloomberg article from last week [1] which strikes us as accurate. Attributed to Maryanne Keller, who is referred to in this article, it says:<p>> 'It’s a saga about gross mismanagement,” said Maryann Keller, a longtime auto-<p>> industry consultant who was on the board of Dollar Thrifty when Hertz acquired<p>> the company. “It could have been salvaged had he picked the right management,”<p>> she said, referring to Icahn.'<p>Icahn lost $1.6b. Thousands of us lost our jobs. But these C-suiters sailed the company to bankruptcy over five years, each of them extracting 7 or 8 figure bonuses. The CIO who laid us all off, for example, received $6.5 million compensation that year [2]. (Sidenote, the work we were doing was replaced with Accenture consultants, who couldn't handle it, screwing up so bad they ended up in court [3].)<p>One former colleague of mine wrote a post on LinkedIn suggesting Icahn was the unwitting victim of untenable debt situation, and while he may be correct that the debt made it difficult, Icahn can read a balance sheet and he understood the situation.<p>I can't speak about Marinello's performance, but I agree that the problem dates back to 2014 or even earlier. People have a widespread belief that Frissora was flying too close to the sun, driven by his aggressive personality. Despite his flaws, he had a great team of people who kept the business running, and it wasn't Frissora who fired them all. Nobody, it turns out, was a fan of him. But everyone agrees he was far better than the gang of unusually wealthy miscreants that Icahn replaced him with.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-27/icahn-files-13d-a-on-hertz" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-27/icahn-fil...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.cio.com/article/3404205/how-much-do-cios-really-make-pay-packages-of-25-fortune-500-execs-revealed.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cio.com/article/3404205/how-much-do-cios-really-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737070" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737070</a>