, Chrysler employees may be faced with their fourth culture, and probable name, change since 1998. That was the year the all-American Chrysler Corp. merged, was usurped, gobbled up, by Daimler Benz AG of Germany, creating DaimlerChrysler.
I joined DaimlerChrysler in 2005 to establish and run its digital communications team after more than 30 years as a broadcast and print journalist. It didn’t take long to lock onto the corporate culture, heavily influenced by the Germans, who were basically the senior partner. Business attire was the norm, saying “ja” to directives from Stuttgart was expected and the free coffee available in the headquarters was your basic grocery store stuff.
The culture was one of constant fear because they had these guys with clipboards walking up and down the aisles in our office suites taking note of how many workers there were and ostensibly making decisions on who should stay and who should receive a cardboard box and told to take a hike. A strange man with long, white hair took over one of our offices. He equipped it with “the best white board possible” and wrote a bunch of stuff on it.