But part of the problem rests with the managers Hartmann chose to run the business.
Hartmann tells us the E-Plus cellular operation will break even next year or in 2000.
Back to square one, Hartmann put Thomas Geitner, a hard-charging RWE executive, in control.
Hartmann is exploiting this advantage by acquiring stakes in other utilities, thereby broadening PreussenElektra's distribution base.
Act II, however, presents Hartmann with new and in many ways more difficult challenges.
Expert witnesses have said she should have been given a different fluid, called Hartmann's.
Hartmann thought he had a deal with BellSouth to increase its O.tel.o stake and manage the business.
Just after the closure of the gathering, Deborah Hartmann Preuss interviewed some of the organizers and participants.
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An affable, athletic man, Hartmann, now 60, calmly agreed that a new phase in managing Veba has begun.
"Our goal is to achieve a leading position in the United States, " said Hartmann in a press release.
Based in Moscow, the company was founded by 28-year-old German entrepreneur Oskar Hartmann.
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"Growth opportunities abroad are larger than in Germany, and this is why internationalization is very important to us, " Hartmann said.
Hartmann is following through on this premise in a big way--and changing the face of European energy in the process.
Mr Hartmann concealed his past when he moved to the US in 1955 and later applied for US citizenship in 1961.
That, says Mr Hartmann, who is as talkative as Mr Doberstein is taciturn, is just something companies have to deal with.
Sniffing Germany's new winds of liberalization for opportunity, Hartmann decided to launch a brand new business for Veba: its O.tel.o telecommunications group.
During World War II Mr Hartmann worked as a member of the SS Death's Head Guard Battalion at Germany's Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Hartmann has big stakes in two Swedish utilities -- Sydkraft and Graningewerke.
"The people proposing this argue 'Don't worry, everything' s fine now we have voluntary programmes on the Cairo model', " says Betsy Hartmann.
Strategic investments like these take years to bear fruit, but when they do the savings from consolidating and streamlining may surprise Hartmann's critics.
Its boss, Ulrich Hartmann, continues to pooh-pooh the idea that big companies should devote themselves to just one business and let investors diversify.
Last month, a group of German business leaders, including Veba's Mr Hartmann, began to draft a set of corporate standards for listed companies.
"In an open-IPO auction--as its name implies--any qualified investor can open an account and bid for shares, " says Gregory Hartmann , Hambrecht's general counsel.
Beyond that, Schrder has a long relationship with Hartmann and Veba.
The top Americans, Jason Hartmann and Shalane Flanagan both finished fourth.
In April 1993 a handsome lawyer named Ulrich Hartmann was named chief executive of Veba AG, Germany's fourth- largest industrial combine (after Daimler-Benz, Siemens and Volkswagen).
All of which means that Schrder is likely to look after his old Veba friends, as Hartmann works to fend off the Greens' most onerous antinuclear demands.
Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K, believes their E3 lineup of games will appeal to the type of gamer who wants to spend a lot of time playing.
To see how Hartmann plans to meet these challenges, we called on him in his spacious office atop Veba's modern steel-and-black-marble headquarters building in a quiet Dsseldorf neighborhood.
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