Cor Boonstra (1938-2025) Outsider who remedied Philips, and found Eindhoven too small

Cor Boonstra was a Dutch top manager with an international track record. An outsider who led Philips for six years, the head office from Eindhoven to Amsterdam and was continued on his departure for exhibition fraud.

Cor Boonstra, died in the night from Friday to Saturday in Amsterdam at the age of 87, came from Ver. His father was a milkman. He did not finish the HBS himself. What the Boonstra born in Leeuwarden missed in formal education, he made more than good with selling and marketing. His start looked like twelve crafts, thirteen accidents. De Grote Vaart – unsuitable. Seller at Unileverdochter van den Bergh & Jurgens – not a pace. His breakthrough, anyway, came to the sale of milk, butter, cheese and eggs. At Zuivelhandel SRV. Boonstra Senior was on the board, Boonstra Junior became a commercial director. In Switzerland he saw a supermarket on wheels. He copied that. A rectangular, electric car, crammed with daily shopping, which simply drove into the street at the customer. « Long live the man of the SRV, your hip, hip, hip hoeree, » the cocktail trio sang in the radio advertisement.

The SRV success had the ingredients that would later become his trademark: innovation, commerce, kiene marketing, but also conflict and fight. At SRV that was a fight with his father. It was about the intended growth. It was on the board of the SRV. Junior won, senior left.

The then chairman of the board summarized the essence of Boonstra later, writes Marcel Metze in his Philips chronicle Let’s Make Things Better: « Cor was a flaming geyser: dynamic, energetic; if you couldn’t keep up with him, it would be better to look forward to another job. It could also be dramatic and straightforward; if he didn’t get his way, then it was very creative and lovable. A man of extremes, so much is certain. »

His commercial feeling and his energy brought him to the top of international business. From 1974, he went through the ranks to increasingly higher positions at Dutch subsidiaries of the American Gigant Sara Lee (Nutrition and Personal Care). Subsidiary Intradal, he made ‘the world’s number one in shoe polish’, as a former colleague mentioned in one NRC-profile.

In 1984 he became CEO of a whole division of Saralee/Douwe Egberts. There he led an almost silent integration of two major acquisitions. In 1993 he received promotion again: second man in the Conerntop. Location: Chicago.

The American style of management lay him. He could also enjoy his new hobby there: collecting art. The aforementioned NRC-Phile: “Cor can seamlessly join that tight American pattern with his do’s and don’ts. He is a typical example of one Chief Executive Officer Who acts as a figurehead, as the Netherlands knows them so little and the United States knows them so much. « 

The longer he worked in Chicago, the heavier the disadvantages began to weigh: the permanent jet lag, and the distance to his family. They affect health and the ‘home base’, the two factors that are easily underestimated in the functioning of a top manager. Ten years later, at the end of 1993, Boonstra suddenly stopped at Sara Lee. He remained a commissioner. That indicates a farewell as friends. Boonstra was unofficially retired. He was 56. His new location: the Bahamas.

And then Jan Timmer called.

Two in the morning

The CEO of Philips (270,000 employees) was looking for a marketing cancer. Conversations followed. Boonstra hesitated. Then came that decisive moment. In Boonstra. The most cross -bodied CEO in the Netherlandsa semi-autobiography by marketing man Manfred Bik, Boonstra tells how Timmer called him at eight o’clock in the evening on the Bahamas. Boonstra: « I realized that it was two o’clock in the Netherlands in the Netherlands. So that man was struggling there on a Sunday morning at two o’clock with the problem of his case. He deserved to be taken seriously. I wanted to help that man. »

Boonstra asked five Dutch top managers for advice. All five said: don’t do it. Philips? A company that turned in. Techies. The family still has a lot of influence. Eindhoven is a somewhat isolated community. Boonstra did it anyway. A contract for 31 months. To help Jan.

Timmer and Boonstra had their origins in common: ordinary boy from the province, not studied. They were also each other’s opposites. Timmer: all his life Philips. Boonstra: the ‘American’ outsider.

Timmer had started a reorganization in 1990 that was unparalleled in the Netherlands, Operation Centurion. In short: 45,000 to 55,000 jobs away. Distress daughters. Simplify the organization. Resist Japanese competition. Survival and win again.

Centurion yielded success in the first years. A series of top managers joined Philips. Boonstra was Timmer’s third possible successor next to Pierre Everaert (ex-AHold) and Henk Bodt. Boonstra received marketing and Asia, among other things. A year and a half later, at the end of 1995, Boonstra was designated as Timmers successor. The tenth president.

Bah, a plate of spaghetti

Everything was Pais and Vree. But Timmers weakened attention. Various structurally loss -making activities, so -called bleedersremained in the min. Once Boonstra was president, the bomb burst. He entered a press conference of Philips’ financial man Dudley Eustace in almost a press conference to spit his bile about failing management. He criticized the Philips organization, called a sign spaghetti in which everything was mixed up. While it had to be a plate of asparagus, everything clearly and well -arranged side by side.

Timmer involved the criticism of itself. He was now a commissioner of the group, but at the beginning of 1997 he no longer wanted to wait for him to promise, but still delayed position as the next president-commissioner. He resigned. Boonstra continued to remedy.

His words and his actions were confronting, Boonstra knew that. « I dispute the complacency in the organization. Many people understand me very well. But my tone is tailored to the people who don’t understand. »

He bumped the German Grundig (consumer electronics), an eternal bleederoff. Multimedia and cable TV went out. The sales organization per country was largely dismantled. In the course of 1998, the sale of Polygram (music and film) followed, which resulted in billions.

A year earlier, Boonstra had announced the move from the head office to Amsterdam. « If you are young and you want to put down an achievement, then you will not stay in Veghel, » he said a few months later NRC. « Then you rent your first room in the capital. Those people have to go after Philips. » Eindhoven was too small, literally and figuratively.

Luxurious position

The remediation and selling of ‘silver’ turned out to be very critical. Philips finished in a luxury position under Boonstra’s presidency at the beginning of 2001: with a full takeover case. But where did that money have to be invested? The strategy faltered.

The president thought differently at his farewell himself. « As if cleaning the organization is not a form of strategy, » he said to NRC. Philips had already tried everything at the time. Mobile phones. New consumer electronics. The group tied up collaborations here and there, but it didn’t really get it. They were exciting times, with the rise of the internet and the question of how Philips should respond to that. An outsider was brought in in the top, Roel Pieper, directly from Silicon Valley. Also not a success. Stock prices went through the roof, large mergers and acquisitions were suddenly the order of the day. If not at Philips.

Privé were even more exciting times, if possible. Boonstra lived separately from his wife Hansje. He had a relationship with founder Sylvia Tòth from Uitzendbureau Content, when Hansje was abducted and released again at the end of 1998. That turned out, afterwards, the start of the recovery of their relationship.

The two worlds, business and private, came together when Boonstra was suspected of trade in prior knowledge at the end of 2000 at the acquisition, at the beginning of 2000, of media company Endemol. Tòth was there. On the evening before his farewell reception in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Boonstra was the only guest in the TV program Barend & Van Dorp. He bit off to the judiciary. A few hours before the reception, the Public Prosecution Service announced its prosecution – too late to cancel the party. The guests sang out in the Concertgebouw.

The prior knowledge store cost him most of his commissions. Soon there turned out to be a matter: trade in Ahold bonds, where he was a commissioner. He had not reported it to the stock market inspector, in spite of the rules. He received a fine for it.

The judge later spoke to him free of prior knowledge. After that news, he boarded his hunt De Palmyre. Against author Bik: « I started sailing for a very long time. »

Around that time there was a postcard in his letterbox. There were two hearts and the text: « Just come home again. »

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