Every business has different needs in a leader at different times. Since the days of the AMF buy-out in the early 1980s, Harley ' s senior executive has tended to either be a company insider, or someone experienced in the specific market or other engineering or production context in which the company operates. Matt Levatich was a mechanical engineer with a manufacturing background. That was augmented by time spent at H-D Europe and at trying to refresh the ailing MV Agusta that Harley had bought. A job that he did well. Before that, having replaced Jim Ziemer in 2009, at the height of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, Johnson Controls COO / President Keith Wandell was brought as a ' Company Doctor '- in 2009 Harley was in every bit as bad a place as it had been in 1984. In 2005 Wandell decided that ' his work here was done ' and recommended the promotion Levatich to head-up the ' C-Suite '. That was a perfectly logical solution. It had logic stamped all over it. That it didn ' t, in the long-term, work out all that well for Levatich had at least as much to do with the baggage that Harley was dragging around with it, the motorcycle industry, and broader economic timing as it did with the inherent fault lines built into Levatich ' s ' More Roads ' Strategic Plan. heritage can kill you
So, Not a Motorcycle Industry Insider After All, Then
Every business has different needs in a leader at different times. Since the days of the AMF buy-out in the early 1980s, Harley ' s senior executive has tended to either be a company insider, or someone experienced in the specific market or other engineering or production context in which the company operates. Matt Levatich was a mechanical engineer with a manufacturing background. That was augmented by time spent at H-D Europe and at trying to refresh the ailing MV Agusta that Harley had bought. A job that he did well. Before that, having replaced Jim Ziemer in 2009, at the height of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, Johnson Controls COO / President Keith Wandell was brought as a ' Company Doctor '- in 2009 Harley was in every bit as bad a place as it had been in 1984. In 2005 Wandell decided that ' his work here was done ' and recommended the promotion Levatich to head-up the ' C-Suite '. That was a perfectly logical solution. It had logic stamped all over it. That it didn ' t, in the long-term, work out all that well for Levatich had at least as much to do with the baggage that Harley was dragging around with it, the motorcycle industry, and broader economic timing as it did with the inherent fault lines built into Levatich ' s ' More Roads ' Strategic Plan. heritage can kill you
There was much about that plan that had a lot of sense about it. It overlooked certain mission-critical issues, however. Principal among them was the aging out of Harley ' s core customer base. The attitudes towards the motorcycle ownership and riding experience displayed by the newly emerging post-boomer era consumer demographics that Harley would be( and now is) dependant on just appeared to be passing Harley by. Just as damaging, the company did nothing address the capital resources it wound need to realise its ' More Roads ' ambitions- not least where 100 new models in a decade and where building the required international infrastructure were concerned. Anyone who may want to quibble with that last remark may want to recall that much of the success that ' More Roads ' was predicated on was being able to move Harley into a position of being able to generate 50 percent of its unit sales and sales revenue from outside the United States. In this ambition Harley, Levatich included, was making assumptions that the then existing international infrastructure and management it had built was adequate, that the planned new models would be fit for that purpose, and that they could rely on a home market that would continue to recover in unit terms, returning to the kind of unit numbers seen before the 2007-2009 near death experience. Moreover, Harley assumed that it could self-generate the capital resources required to achieve all this while still making shareholders purr in a land of dividend nirvana. Did someone just say ' naïve '? Wreckless, foolhardy and just plain wrong is more like. In replacing one failed CEO with another failed CEO, in replacing one failed fiveyear strategic plan with another failed five-year strategic plan, the ' original sin ' that steered Harley into its present malaise was having a board that assumed that a brand culture such as Harley ' s, and the dealer network that supported it, was something that could be managed by senior executives with zero experience of how Harley got to where it was. The art of ' brand management ' is not necessarily a transferrable skill. If mishandled, a brand can become a liability instead. There comes a point where you no longer own it. Your market does. Your customers do. By voting with their discretionary disposable income, it is they who decide whether or not you have got it right. Heritage can be a wonderful thing, but it can also kill you. A positive legacy is the stuff of wet dreams for brand marketeers, it is their Holy Grail, their raison d ' etre, their sacred quest. However, if successful there always comes a point at which the tail starts to wag the dog. Harley ' s ' original sin ' was to think that all it needed was someone with advanced level experience of contemporary corporate brand manipulation and control and everything would be okay. My oh my, what a mistake. How simplistic, how ill informed, how naïve. What they needed, above all, was someone who understood the Harley brand within the context of its engineering and riding eco system, within the context of the global motorcycle industry of which it is now an ever-diminishing force. We find ourselves in a situation where Harley no longer has a boardroom connection to what and who it is. It no longer has anyone in the boardroom( as far as I can determine) with the experience of a career spent at Harley- Davidson, a career with significant third-party time spent elsewhere in the motorcycle industry, a career spent observing, internalising and understanding how 8 billion other people outside the United States see business being done( in the motorcycle industry and elsewhere), or even a career with oil under the fingernails- no engineering, design, productionization, process control or motorcycle gravitas at all. What could possibly go wrong. Instead, the top job at Harley-Davidson has now been reduced to just another next step, another next stop on the ever-revolving CEO circuit. The domestic US motorcycle industry is in decline. It should not be this way. It need not be this way. The few areas where there is growth are based on low cost, low displacement imported motorcycles. Despite the mountain of challenges, the motorcycle industry outside the United States is booming- certainly in relative terms. It ' s great that Harley is( belatedly) waking up to one of the pathways its brand needs, but it is nailed-on that the new budget-bikes will be made elsewhere, with all angst and tariff implications that entails. Before anyone complains about my perspective it is important to realize that this is something that Harley has brought on itself. It has done so through management failure and a lack of understanding of the market it is dependent on, the market it is theoretically a part of and was once a leading player in. It ' s not that the ' Mo-Co ' took its eye of the ball, but that it has been blind in both eyes to what has been going on in its own backyard, its own industry and with its customer opportunities for years.
Robin Bradley
Co-owner / Editor-in-Chief robin @ dealer-world. com
4 AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE DEALER- SEPTEMBER 2025 www. AMDmag. com