How To Grow Without Getting Big

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Just how much Magna relies on its managers was made plain one morning last August at Cam-Slide.

Cam-Slide occupies a handsome brick building in an industrial park built by Magna a few years ago, an hour or so north of Toronto. Peter Reinlaender, the company's general manager, pulled up to the plant at six that morning, as usual, only to be told that the giant Komatsu 500-ton transfer press wasn't working. Its computerized controller kept announcing that everything was set for operation, but the machine wouldn't budge. Reinlaender and the press operator worked until eight to start the press, but without success.

Like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, the effects of the shutdown were soon felt elsewhere in the factory. The Komatsu churned out parts for Cam-Slide's main product, the Taurus/Sable seat adjusters. Without the press in operation, Reinlaender had to find something for the idled press operators to do and had to change some of the assembly lines over to different products. By the time it was fixed, he had lost eight shifts' worth of regular work.

"When something like this happens, I must be involved," says Reinlaender, his precise, slightly accented english reflecting his emigration only a year ago from Germany. Yet solving such problems -- the conventional responsibility of plant managers everywhere -- is only a portion of his job. Like all Magna managers, he is responsible for submitting bids on new work: nine quotes in August alone, he remembers. He travels to Detroit two or three times a month, on average, to meet with his opposite numbers in the Big Three. He is responsible for hiring and, through his eight-person supervisory team, for purchasing, engineering, and accounting. His employees, who call him Peter, are likely to come to him with personal problems ranging from illness in the family to difficulty dealing with immigration papers. He works 12-hour days, five or six days a week.

"We call the head man in each division a general manager," says J. W. Leonard Johnson, a company executive who until recently ran a division himself. "But he is much closer to being a president. He has financial responsibility, marketing responsibility, management responsibility, manufacturing, shipping, every aspect."

In a sense, it was Reinlaender who made it possible for Stefan Boekamp to start Slide-Master. When Boekamp came to Fred Gingl with his plan for another seat-adjuster plant, Gingl's first question was "Have you got a manager?" -- meaning someone to run the old plant if Boekamp took over the new one. No, Boekamp answered, but surely you do. Well, maybe. Gingl had been introduced to Reinlaender in Europe by a mutual acquaintance, had hired him, and had installed him in corporate headquarters to learn the ropes. Now he put him in Cam-Slide under Boekamp, both to train him in plant management and to try him out. After six months, Reinlaender seemed ready to take over, and Gingl approved Boekamp's proposal to start and run the new division.

As prime recruiter, Gingl may have the most critical job at Magna. "That's 70% of my work; 90% of all the managers are people I brought in to Magna," he says. "I go on shopping trips." his secret is the fact that he, like Stronach, was born in Austria and speaks fluent German. Like a major-league baseball scout scouring Latin America for overlooked prospects, he cruises Western Europe, mainly West Germany and Austria. The results of his expeditions are reflected in the ubiquitous German accents around Magna and in the number of managers with names like Wolfgang and Gunther. About 70% of Magna's managers, Gingl estimates, are immigrants.

Why Europe? It costs Magna about $15,000, Gingl says, to move a manager to Canada, and many of them need instruction in English as well as training in the ways of the company. Like Reinlaender, most recruits are likely to spend a couple of weeks in the corporate office and several months in a division, learning plant management. But, adds Gingl, his alternatives are sparse. Finding entrepreneurial managers with tool-and-die backgrounds in the United States or Canada is hard, and if you do find them, they are likely to have their own businesses. In West Germany, by contrast, technical training in tool-and-die making is well developed, but there is little tradition of entrepreneurship.

From the recruits' point of view, Magna's attraction is the opportunity to play on a larger diamond. "We can offer them a much bigger realm of decision making," Gingl says. "That's what makes the difference."

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