Klaus Kleinfeld
Klaus Christian Kleinfeld (born
November 6 1957 in
Bremen,
Germany) is a German manager and has been President and
Chief Executive Officer (
CEO) of
Siemens AG since
2005.
Kleinfeld received a master's degree in business administration and economics from
Georg August University in
Goettingen (Germany), followed by a doctorate from
Julius Maximilian University in
Wuerzburg (Germany). His doctoral dissertation was entitled "The Corporate Identity Concept from the Perspective of Strategic Company Management." In 1982, he began work as a research assistant at the Institute of the Foundation for Empirical Social Research in
Nuremberg (Germany). In 1986, he joined
Ciba-Geigy in
Basel (
Switzerland), where he was a strategic product manager for two pharmaceutical segments.
Kleinfeld has worked for
Siemens AG since
1987. His first position was in the company's Corporate Sales and Marketing unit. He subsequently founded and led Siemens Management Consulting (SMS), an organization formed to develop and oversee corporate revitalization and business improvement programs. Under his leadership, SMC became a highly profitable and respected consulting business that established cutting-edge practices in benchmarking, business re-engineering and innovation within the company. Kleinfeld personally led projects for a number of global Siemens operating groups, including wireless communications, industry automation and power generation. He was also a key architect of Siemens' top+ program, a company-wide initiative to improve performance and competitiveness. In 1998, he transferred to Siemens' Medical Engineering Group (Med), where he headed the company's worldwide angiography, fluoroscopy and X-ray systems business. In April
2000, he was appointed to Med's managing board.
In January
2001, Kleinfeld moved to the United States, where he served first as Chief Operating Officer (COO) and then â€" from 2002 to 2004 â€" as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Siemens USA, which has 65,000 employees and a business volume of some US$17 billion. From Siemens headquarters in
New York City, he headed and successfully restructured the company's U.S. activities, which offer products, systems and solutions in the medical, power generation and distribution, automation and control, lighting, information and communications, transportation and building technologies sectors. Kleinfeld has been a member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG since December 2002.
In January 2004, Klaus Kleinfeld was appointed to Siemens' Corporate Executive Committee, where, for several months, he had special responsibility for the company's Information and Communications business area as well as Siemens' regional companies in
Africa, the
Middle East,
Russia and the other countries of the C.I.S. He also headed Siemens' corporate strategy department. Kleinfeld relinquished these responsibilities in the middle of 2004, when he was appointed Vice President of Siemens AG.
Kleinfeld assumed the position of President and Chief Executive Officer of Siemens AG on
January 27,
2005, succeeding the company's long-serving CEO, Dr.
Heinrich von Pierer. He is the 11th company head in Siemens' 159-year history. Under his leadership, Siemens' mobile handset business, an arm of the company's struggling Communications Group, was sold (for a negative charge) to Taiwan's
BenQ in June
2005. This move marked the end of Siemens' activities in the consumer mobile phone market.
Kleinfeld is a member of the board of directors of
Alcoa Inc., of
Bayer AG and of
Citigroup Inc. He also serves as a director of the
Metropolitan Opera in
New York and belongs to the International Business Council of the
World Economic Forum.
Kleinfeld, who is married and has two daughters, is considered to be a performance-oriented, pragmatic and socially concerned manager and an excellent communicator. He is also an active sportsman and runs in the
New York Marathon every year.
Corporate Identity und strategische Unternehmensführung, Akademie-Verlag München 1994, ISBN 3-929115-16-6
*
Siemens AG Official website*
Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld: "Nobody's Perfect, but a Team Can Be"
