Hard-wired: Kleisterlee is reinventing the inventive Dutch firm Philips

Gerard Kleisterlee followed his father into the electronics firm and has spent nine years at the helm turning it around The year that Gerard Kleisterlee took over as chief executive of Philips, the company abruptly sank into the largest loss in its history. The Dutch firm, still best known for consumer electronics, had skirted around bankruptcy in the mid-1990s after a series of strategic …