SITTING on his pristine Porsche tractor ploughing his potato field, Wendelin Wiedeking looks every inch a south German gentleman farmer. Watching him in his local tucking into his schnitzel, drinking Pils beer and joking with the landlord that a buxom barmaid would draw more business than the two waiters he employs, you would be convinced of it.

Wiedeking has attracted many epithets in his life and Herr Dr Wiedeking the Jolly Farmer would be among the mildest. He is better known as the Rambo of the German motor industry, the man with the sharp tongue and swift temper whose oft-repeated phrase “you had better take care” is not a sign of comradely concern but carries the same overtones as Don Corleone making someone an offer he can’t refuse.

He is a man who has never known failure. And that is an achievement in an industry famed for high-flyers such as Jürgen Schrempp (a close friend) and Bernd Pichetsrieder crashing in flames. The first company Wiedeking ever set up – a flat rental firm when he was a student – is still in business. And he has turned Porsche into the world’s most profitable car company.

The astonishing success of Porsche is entirely down to him. It has sales of more than €6.5 billion (£4.8 billion) with profits exceeding €780m (£570m). He has turned the Porsche family who own the company from millionaires into billionaires and himself into the highest-paid German boss of all time. He began earning less than his contemporary chief executives but his salary has taken gargantuan annual leaps, soaring to an estimated €60m (£44m) this year.

He is universally recognised in Japan, America and Europe as a master of the automobile universe. He is passionate about cars in a way Germans can afford to be, being the inventors of the automobile and defenders of the right to drive very fast. As Germans sometimes remark, the third lane of the autobahns was added for Porsche drivers.

All of which means Wiedeking attracts a great deal of envy and some catty asides. “I hardly know of any boardroom executive who likes him. Wiedeking loves to shoot at his own kind,” commented a senior manager at a rival company.

In contrast, ordinary Germans admire him. They see Wiedeking as a defender of Germany’s social-market system and are inordinately proud of Porsche even though most could afford only the key fob of a 911 Carrera.

It is Wiedeking’s preference for plain speaking that rubs up his peers the wrong way. German bosses and politicians avoid all criticism of each other but this is simply not in Wiedeking’s character. He has called people phoney, admits to being provocative, and prefers people who speak their mind and are not given to philosophising.

“I am sometimes very hard, also on myself. Otherwise I’m not the type to sit in the corner and whine when something goes badly,” he said. “I sometimes shout – but never without reason. When I find out that someone hasn’t done what they told me they would, then I take action. I don’t have trouble calling a spade a spade.”

Wiedeking had a brief spell at Porsche in the 1980s as a highflying assistant to the board with responsibility for production. He returned as a full board member in 1991 to find Porsche deep in a crisis. It had been losing money since 1988 and was on the verge of going broke as the Porsche family and the board fought over what rescue strategy to adopt.

It was only with reluctance that the family agreed to Wiedeking taking over. And even Wiedeking admits he spent a month thinking over whether he should take the job. For a year he was hamstrung with the title “board spokesman”, before he effectively took control in 1993. By then Porsche was producing fewer than 15,000 cars a year and clocking up a huge loss.

In Germany during the 1980s Porsche had become a national joke as the sports car of choice for pimps and gold-chained men with bare chests and a potency problem. Few people were impressed with the model range, particularly the front-engined 928. And the 944, which used many Volkswagen components, played second fiddle to the sought-after Golf GTI. For reasons best known to themselves, Porsche had judged the classic 911 a museum piece. Customers viewed the new models as “not real Porsches”. The only question was who would swallow the company: Daimler or Volkswagen? “Wiedeking was the right man at the right time,” said Uwe Hück, the Porsche works council chairman, owner of a white 911 and one of the power brokers in the giant IG Metall trade union. The union leadership’s respect for Wiedeking led to them presenting him with an honorary membership. Wiedeking proudly wears the union lapel badge on his suits.

Once Wiedeking was in the driving seat he revived the 911 and set about developing the Boxster. Indeed, his love of the 911 neatly dovetailed into his family life. His favourite model is the 911 Carerra. And it just so happened that his two small children fitted snugly into the rear jump seats. And his development of the rear spoiler served brilliantly as a dual-purpose cooler and nappy-changing table.

“The story is true,” he said. “The spoiler was the perfect place to change the children and it was warm, too. The children enjoyed it.”

First, though, he had to save the company. The banks wouldn’t touch him – ironic, when today they are prepared to let him draw a €35 billion line of credit should he wish to take over Volkswagen. Even so, Wiedeking has little good to say about bankers. “They don’t understand the automobile industry,” he once remarked.

Three days after settling into his office, Wiedeking faced his employees and told them that 1,800 of them would lose their jobs out of the 9,000 workforce. It was a moment that still lives with him.

“The road in front of my office was full of workers. And I stood before them looking at their faces, seeing their fears. As a businessman I was responsible for them. I was deciding not over machinery. I was talking about destiny, families, their existence. I didn’t prepare a speech. I spoke spontaneously. There is no time to think things over when the workforce is suddenly outside your door wanting to save their jobs. I said it wasn’t about getting rid of jobs it was about saving 6,000. Anything else would have meant the end of the company.”

Nobody outside Porsche reckoned Wiedeking could pull it off. He was dismissed as a stand-in before the receivers took over. Der Spiegel magazine said he looked as impressive as “the cashier of a window shutter manufacturer”. The workers nicknamed him The Baron for his almost feudal approach.

“Nothing was working, not a single department,” said Wiedeking. As cars rolled off the production line, quality controllers were sending them back to have faults corrected. “We had to clear up and do it quickly or else lose all credibility,” he added.

Within a year Porsche was back in profit and climbing steadily. Between 1994 and 2004 profits rose from €1m to €779m and turnover from €980m to €6.5 billion.

For years afterwards Wiedeking would carry in his briefcase documents from that dark period to show people who doubted just how bad it had been back then. It was as if he needed to ease his conscience – that the workers had paid with their jobs for the mistakes management had made.

Wiedeking’s lifelong affair with cars was shaped by his grandmother. “She gave me the pocket money to buy toy cars,” he said. His collection of model cars now runs to well over 1,500, stored at his home and decorating his office. As a boy he built and raced soapboxes.

Another car set him on track for his first million, which he had set himself to make before he was 30. As a student in Aachen he rented a flat from an estate agent who drove a BMW CSi. “I reckoned the fee I paid had bought her new tyres,” he recalled. So he set up his own rental agency.

When he was 15 and his father died, Wiedeking had learnt very quickly to set clear goals in life and concentrate on achieving them. “I learnt what duty means and how to fulfil it. I also noticed that if you want to achieve something, you must take risks, show initiative and work hard. And that I have always done,” he said.

He admits to being impatient and getting rid of anyone who has doubts about a project once a decision is made. The fastest way people can get shown the door in Wiedeking’s presence is to boast about their single-figure golf handicap. “He can’t be spending much time at work,” said Wiedeking.

He may behave like a Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street but that’s just his manner. Otherwise, Wiedeking is happy to relax in his den, repair clocks, build model cars and play the Fat Controller with his railway set.

Porsche’s success is built on a close relationship between the management and the workforce, and Wiedeking believes that shareholder culture would destroy this.

“With [Germany’s] social-market economy we have created an outstanding system and we shouldn’t give it up,” he said. “It has served us well for decades and can further do so. Consensus strengthens our industries. If we regularly listened to investors, we would become too short-term orientated. That doesn’t work in Europe.

“The Porsche philosophy is that first comes the client, then come the workers, then the suppliers and finally the shareholders. When the first three are happy then so are the stockholders,” he added.

The stake in Volkswagen was built up to 30% to preserve the very culture that Porsche stands for – and by inference the rest of mainstream German business. Without the car industry as the biggest single employer in the country, Germany would in Wiedeking’s view become a zoological garden for visitors from the Far East.

It is hard to argue that Wiedeking has got it wrong. Particularly in the current climate of uncertainty where some of the free-market chickens are coming home to roost. Germany can afford to stand and watch the fallout, knowing it is not the cause of all the clucking in the roost.