Who murdered MG Rover?
In April 2005, when the assembly lines at the Longbridge plant ground to a halt after a century of car production, the British nation wanted to know: Who had murdered MG Rover? The answer to this seemed simple: it was the Phoenix Consortium who had failed to turn around the ailing car company after having purchased it from BMW for £10, five years earlier. But the experts knew that there was more to it than that. The company, once described as “the ‘nglish Patient” by BMW in the 90s before the German owner washed its hands of its loss-making acquisition, had lacked sufficient management capability to compete effectively for decades. Cambridge Judge Business School’s Dr Matthias Holweg and Professor Nick Oliver, who delved deeper into the company’s history for answers by interviewing more than thirty former CEOs, senior managers as well as government and union officials that shaped the company since 1968 made the following assessment: “Although apparently having the scale to be a global
