Detroit, Michigan — Since taking the CEO job at Adient in October 2018, Doug DelGrosso has been operating as a kind of field surgeon — cutting away situations of the past that left the seating giant with billions in losses, applying a tourniquet to its bleeding business units and ultimately asking the company’s employees to endure through the pain.

‘We’ve been pretty upfront about what needs to be done,’ a stoic DelGrosso said from his corner office in suburban Detroit in November, shortly after sharing some bad news with his headquarters staff. ‘I thanked them for taking the burden on.’

‘The burden’ is what DelGrosso has declared as a back-to-Basics’ drive. He believes Adient — the world’s biggest seat supplier, with 2018 revenue of $17.4 bn — has been distracted by costly ideas not core to its business. He intends to scale back from those distractions and focus on what made Adient powerful: car seats.

That path, he said, will bring Adient back to breakeven in 2020.

But there will be short-term pain at the company.

Corporate employees will end 2019 on unpaid leave. In a company town hall meeting in October, DelGrosso announced that 1,300 nonplant salaried employees would not work or receive pay for the weeks of Thanksgiving, November 25-29, or the week ending  3 January 2020.

‘With so much uncertainty, I decided to take decisive action,’ DelGrosso said. ‘I think people get it. They probably don’t like it, but it was the right thing to do. We’re continuing on the path we’re on.’

CEO Doug DelGrosso said Adient is allowing questionable operations to expire.

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