For nearly two decades, the name Fiat has been synonymous with the indomitable personality of Giovanni Agnelli (TIME cover, Jan. 17, 1969), the son of Fiat's founder and the president who transformed the huge industrial firm into a major multinational empire. Thus it has come as something of a shock to many Italians recently to learn that there is yet another Agnelli in their future. In the 13 months since he was named to Fiat's No. 2 job, taking over nearly all of the corporation's day-today operations, Younger Brother Umberto Agnelli, 38, has stepped from a lifetime in "Gianni's" shadow and begun casting a considerable image in his own right.
The experience has not been altogether a happy one. Italy's strike-ridden economy, slumping for the past three years amid a virulent inflation rate that rose to 7.3% in 1972, has kept Umberto hopping from one crisis to another. Last year alone Fiat production fell short by 200,000 cars because of strikes. As a result, the company failed to show a profit or pay an interim dividend for the first time in its history. The prospects for an improved labor climate and an end to Italy's recession this year are mixed, but the younger Agnelli expects Fiat to end it in the black. Declares Umberto: "Our only defense is to be constantly on the offensive, expanding our markets abroad, seeking a slice of the market in the territory of others."
Angel Face. That strategy has previously served Agnelli with remarkable success. As president of Fiat France from 1965 to 1970, he doubled the firm's auto sales in that country. Later, as president of Fiat International, he made Italy's bestselling car the most popular import throughout the rest of Western Europe, started building Fiat factories in Argentina and Poland, and launched an energetic sales campaign in the U.S. Since 1970, the number of Fiats sold in the American market has doubled, to nearly 60,000 last year. For the first eleven months of 1972, Fiat was the fourth-largest-selling independent import in the nation, after Volkswagen, Toyota and Datsun.
Lately, Umberto has been surprising Italy's staid business establishment with regularity. Not long after taking over as Fiat's sole general manager, he put 5,000 Fiat white-collar workers on "flextime," under which they can choose their own working hours within certain broad limits. Last fall rocked the conservative leadership of Confindustria, an association of the nation's private manufacturers, by proposing that small firms be better represented in the group and that Italian industry in general establish better relations with workers. "La scossa Agnelli" (the Agnelli shock), Italian newspapers called the proposal. After a number of such scosse, the press came up with a nickname for mild-looking Umberto: "The mastiff with the angel face." At present Umberto is aiming many of his barks in the direction of France's Citroen, with which Fiat has been engaged in a joint venture since 1968. Irked because the French firm has resisted his efforts to integrate the two companies more closely, Agnelli threatens to dissolve the marriage "unless Citroen completely changes its attitude."