Former CEO of DHL on leading it through an existential crisis

Utterly absorbing account from ex-DHL Express chief Ken Allen (pictured above) on DHL’s troubled takeover of US domestic express provider Airborne Express and the radical change in strategy needed. One for freight historians who remember DHL’s departure from the US domestic express business in 2008, but who may not have realised how close the acquisition came to sinking the entire business. “I’ll never forget one of the first management meetings I attended after taking over DHL Express in 2007. The loss that month was $113m, but the management team was proud — the planned loss had been $116m! We couldn’t even tell where the problems were because the profit and loss account was just a sea of red.” But the most brutal upshot was the near-10,000 redundancies the change in strategy entailed.