Harry Pollak, born as Jindřich Pollak (24 February 1923 – 28 February 2014), was a Czech mechanical engineer and economist of Jewish origin. He left then-Czechoslovakia at 25 and spent most of his life in England, eventually becoming a financial consultant. He was part of the team that helped rescue British car maker Aston Martin from bankruptcy. He worked for IBM, Krupp, and Dunlop. The companies he financially saved also included a Swiss paper mill, a number of heavy manufacturers, and the largest European producer of printed circuit boards.
Life
Harry Pollak was born on 24 February 1923 in Dvůr Semtín, Czechoslovakia. He was born as the only child to a family of landowners. He was able to escape the Holocaust only because his parents sent him to study at a lyceum in Nîmes in 1938. When he was 17, he joined the allied forces in France. He fought against the Nazis during World War II, and was one of the Czech soldiers who laid siege to the German-held city of Dunkirk in September 1944. He returned to Czechoslovakia with the Western Allies in May 1945.
After the war, he was proclaimed German and a Nazi collaborator, and the authorities in Votice withheld his family farmland for three years. Before the Communist Coup in 1948, he was denied his master's degree from the Czech Technical University in Prague. Following the Communist Coup, his inherited property, which had been returned to him by a court decision, was permanently confiscated. In 1949, he and his wife Jarmila managed to escape over the Bohemian Forest into West Germany. Later, they continued on to Great Britain where they received asylum and Harry finished his studies. They had a son named René Thomas.
In 2003, he received a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Economics in Prague. In 2016, the Centre for Restructuring and Insolvency at the University of Economics was named after Pollak, acknowledging his achievements in the field of restructuring businesses.
For most of his career, Pollak worked as a crisis manager in various countries. Apart from the UK, he was employed in Germany, Italy, and the United States, and he finally settled in Netstal in Switzerland, where he died on 28 February 2014 at the age of 91. He is buried in Votice near his birthplace.
Professional career
Three months after having escaped to England from the Communist regime, Pollak got his first job. On May 2, 1950, he started working as an engineer with Carrier Engineering Co. Ltd. at a weekly wage of £9. He received much more responsibility and a higher salary as a project engineer at Brightside Foundry. Shortly after that, he accepted a job on Northumberland Avenue, which was a disappointment for him.
He became an associate member of the Institution of Heating and Ventilating Engineers and was contracted to lead Arcon, an American air conditioning company, in England. Pollak recalled this job as a milestone in his career. He also developed an effective refrigerated truck for Express Dairy and was eventually named general manager of Westair, a division of Westool.
Pollak became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, but he was no longer fully satisfied with working in this field, so he decided to focus on business consulting. In February 1961, he started implementing the US Value Analysis system at the Zurich branch of Mead Carney & Co. He also worked in Germany for companies like Auto Union, IBM, Krupp-Ardelt, and Bargedorfer Eisenwerk. In the UK, he worked with Sturtevant Engineering, followed by MEM, a producer of electric switches, a producer of motors for home appliances (AEI), and in the transformers division of English Electric. He applied for a third week of unpaid leave at English Electric to travel to Canada, but was denied, so he decided to hand in his notice and go on holiday.
Upon his return from Canada in 1966, he already had a contract as a senior consultant with Dunlop, a company with 105,000 employees worldwide, where he implemented Value Analysis and solved corporate problems.
After that, he accepted a job with a newly established company, Keyser Ullmann Industries, which was engaged in restructuring businesses for its mother bank. Pollak’s first assignment was with Hallam Sleigh & Cheston Ltd. He was installed there as a member of the Board of Directors in order to restructure the company from scratch and rescue it from bankruptcy. His other contractors included the market research company (KBMS) and Negretti & Zamba, a manufacturer of precision products for the aircraft industry.