SA Group CEO Carlos Tavares, Automotive News’ 2019 Industry Leader of the Year, spoke last week at a ceremony in Detroit honoring the winners of this year’s All-Star Awards. Here are edited excerpts of his speech.
I have never, ever in my professional life worked with such a top executive [as Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Mike Manley], with such a high level of maturity, such a high level of expertise, such a high level of sense of purpose for his company and for his people. And this is what makes [the pending PSA-FCA merger] special.
What makes it special for FCA and for PSA is the fact that Mike and myself, we want to make things better for our people.
All the employees of FCA and PSA should thank Mike for what he’s doing right now in the discussions we are having together. This is really important because what we are looking for [in the first 10 years] is that the employees of the merged company will say, well, back then, 10 years or 20 years ago, there were two guys. They were able to respect each other. … They were able to control their egos. They were able to take care of their people.
Obviously, this award is for the employees of PSA. They were moved in the way they were able to turn around their company. And we were blessed with the support of our unions.
[It] is very important also to express my very sincere thanks to my teammates in the executive committee. As Mike said, being part of the PSA executive committee is not a walk in the park. It’s difficult. It’s difficult for them to be challenged by their CEO even when the results are OK, because we can always do better.
We have three major values in our company. … They were selected by our people, not by the top management of the company. And that is the reason why these values are so powerful.
The first one is win together. Winning is only possible if it is a collective winning. And we work cross-functional across functionally to do it all together.
The second one is agility. We were facing a near-death experience back in 2012. This near-death experience is a powerful engine for the future. It gives us the sense that we need to be agile because the world is more and more chaotic.
And the third value of our company is efficiency and effectiveness. We understand that resources are scarce — human resources, financial resources, planning resources, they are scarce, and we have to do more with less. The only thing that we ask our employees is to act in the company as if they were making decisions at home.
This is what they understand at the end of the day. And we are blessed with that.
So what I would like to tell you tonight is, first of all, how blessed I am to be working with Mike.
I really hope that everything will go smoothly. And so far [that] is the case and you can see through our friendship, through our relationship, that we are really doing our best to make things happen and that I think we are on the right path.
Secondly, I would like to thank you all for recognizing the efforts of the PSA employees. They are the winners. …
And third, I would like to tell you that I am extremely excited about the changes that we are going to face.
Of course, 10 years down the road, the industry will be very different from what it is today. But technology, human skills, human talents will make a difference. And this is what I am very confident on. Thank you very much.