Manfred Lennings

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Manfred Lennings (born February 23, 1934 in Oberhausen ; † March 1, 2008 in Essen ) was a German industrial manager. From 1975 to 1983 he was chairman of the board of the Gutehoffnungshütte group (GHH, now MAN ), later chairman of the supervisory board at Krupp , chairman of the board of directors of the Treuhandanstalt and long-standing president of the German Economic Institute .

education

The son of the smelter's director Wilhelm Lennings (1900–1944) studied business administration in Munich and then mining at the Clausthal University of Technology . During his studies he was among other things chairman of the Association of German Student Unions in 1959/60 .

Manager in the Gutehoffnungshütte group

After graduating as Dr.-Ing. (1964) Lennings began as a board assistant at Gutehoffnungshütte Aktienverein in Oberhausen (GHH). There he made a rapid career and in 1968 was appointed director as head of the planning and economics department. In the same year, at the age of 34, he moved to the board of directors of Deutsche Werft AG, which at the time was still a majority subsidiary of GHH and which soon merged to become Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG (HDW), of which Lennings took over as chairman in 1970. Five years later, Lennings finally moved to the top of the entire GHH group. Because of his rapid ascent, Lennings was named "Manager of the Month" by Capital magazine .

The GHH-Holding, which emerged from the Oberhausen ironworks of the same name, was Europe's largest mechanical engineering group at the time and employed around 80,000 people with a turnover of 18.7 billion  DM (1982). However, around 60,000 of these were accounted for by the commercial vehicle subsidiary MAN and the companies assigned to it. At the beginning of the 1980s, MAN got into a serious crisis, which also resulted in considerable losses for the parent company. However, a restructuring concept subsequently presented by Lennings met with massive resistance from GHH's main shareholders Allianz and Commerzbank , so that Lennings finally resigned from his position as CEO of GHH in November 1983. His successor Klaus Götte , however, essentially implemented Lennings' restructuring plan. In 1986 GHH and its previous subsidiary were merged to form today's holding company MAN AG and the company headquarters relocated to Munich.

Consultant and chairman of the Krupp supervisory board

Lennings himself subsequently decided not to take up the active management of a large company again. Instead, he concentrated on consulting activities and his numerous supervisory board mandates, which he had retained at GHH even after he left.

In 1989 he was appointed to the supervisory board of the Krupp group and later also took over its chairmanship. During his tenure as Chairman of the Supervisory Board, among other things, the transformation of Fried. Krupp GmbH in a stock corporation (1992), the takeover of Dortmunder Hoesch AG in 1992 and the merger with Thyssen AG 1997–99. He also held other supervisory board mandates at major corporations such as Bayer , Deutsche Shell , Alcatel SEL , Lufthansa and Deutsche Post AG .

After German reunification , Lennings was appointed to the board of directors of the Berlin Treuhandanstalt in 1990 , which he took over as chairman in April 1993 and held it until the trust was dissolved at the end of 1994. From 1982 to 2000 he was also President of the Institute of German Economy in Cologne. In this function, he was also a member of the Presidia of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) and the Federation of German Employers' Associations (BDA).

literature

  • Johannes Bähr, Ralf Banken, Thomas Flemming: The MAN. A German Industrial History , Munich 2008 ISBN 978-3-406-57762-8 ( Google preview )
  • Munzinger Internationales Biographisches Archiv 17/1998 from April 13, 1998

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bodo Herzog:  Lennings, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 214 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Return to the hut . In: Die Zeit , No. 36/1973
  3. ↑ The fight for heads and concepts . In: Die Zeit , No. 44/1983
  4. ↑ Pilot on board . In: Die Zeit , No. 8/1989
personal data
SURNAME Lennings, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German manager
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberhausen
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 2008
Place of death eat