Last September, Moody on the Market reported a story about former Whirlpool Corporation top executive Joe Liotine joining Milwaukee-based Briggs & Stratton as the new Chief Executive Officer.
Apparently, the union was not a good fit. We’re told Liotine exited the company just six months after joining. At the time of this publication, Mr. Liotine could not be reached for comment.
According to the Briggs & Stratton website, the interim CEO taking over for Liotine is Kristina Cerniglia. She also serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the company.
Observers note one factor for Liotine’s departure might be the overall direction of the company itself. Briggs & Stratton has confirmed they are making “difficult but necessary” job cuts to ensure their organizational structure aligns with their strategic goals.
According to a report from the Milwaukee Business Journal, another issue was that Liotine’s “vision didn’t align” with KPS Capital Partners, the company’s private equity owner.
Air-tight vision alignment among a company’s leadership is key in Corporate America, especially when so many companies are currently in a downsizing and readjustment mode.
Readers will recall that Liotine spent 18 years at Whirlpool Corporation before the surprising January 2023 announcement that the then-President and Chief Operating Officer would transition to an advisory role before departing the company at the end of March 2023. In that announcement, CEO Marc Bitzer would assume “direct responsibility for global operations.”
One year later, in March 2024, Whirlpool Corporation announced the company is moving to a more simplified and focused organizational model, “…to support its continued transformation into a high-growth, high-margin business that will enable its long-term success.”
Employees were informed that the company had been working on the changes for at least a year and the “decentralized model (will shift to) more autonomous business units and a leaner, more strategic corporate center,” i.e., a complete return to regional operations as opposed to leveraging a global performance model.
In the 2023 annual report letter to shareholders, Bitzer pointed to Whirlpool’s divestiture of the Embraco manufacturing company in Brazil (a refrigeration components manufacturer), the sale of the majority of their China business, and the then-pending transfer of their European assets as evidence that the company was “indeed starting to see the beginning of a very different Whirlpool.”
Even since the March 2024 announcement, Whirlpool Corporation’s footprint has changed considerably. Some high-level leaders have left the company; another wave of job cuts is expected in the last week of April; and earlier this week the company noted the successful completion of the transfer and sale of its Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) assets.
Of the EMEA move, a company-issued statement said, “This marks a significant step in Whirlpool’s portfolio transformation and is expected to provide considerable opportunities to maximize value.”
Whirlpool Corporation leaders are telling shareholders the company will now focus on its positions in the Americas and India, along with new products, including those from the higher-margin KitchenAid small domestic appliance business.
Whether Liotine’s departures from Whirlpool Corporation and Briggs & Stratton were harbingers of ongoing economic instability, a trend by U.S.-based companies to deglobalize, or just unfortunate coincidence is unclear. What is clear is that corporate leaders are still holding hope that the U.S. economy will return to a stronger growth mode sometime soon and when that happens, their strategies will be mature enough to capitalize.
