Abogados

"He changed the mind-set of the company," said David Adelman, who analyzes Kellogg for Morgan Stanley. "Seven years ago, Kellogg was waffling. It had lost all momentum as a business. ... Now it has industry-leading sales growth."

In Washington, Gutierrez's nomination to be Bush's second secretary of commerce was a surprise. Neither a confidant of the president's nor a prominent political operative or fund-raiser, the Kellogg chief executive breaks the mold of recent commerce heads.

Former Michigan Gov. John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, said that since the 2000 campaign, Gutierrez has been working quietly in that battleground state to recruit Hispanic voters to the Republican Party. He participated in an economic summit during the first Bush campaign.

Despite his corporate clout, Gutierrez has cut a low profile, according to lobbyists and observers of the Bush economic team.

"For all I know, this man could be a policy wonk who's going to be a great, persuasive salesman for the president's program," said Daniel Mitchell, an economist at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. "I just don't know."

To those who have watched his company, Gutierrez has been a marvel.

"He has this ability to focus in on the key issues, to talk to people about their concerns, weigh out the options and make the right decisions," said Ronald Larson, a professor of marketing at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and a former Kellogg marketing researcher.

In September, Fortune magazine waxed about Gutierrez's "disarming charisma, steely resolve and ... utter lack of pretension," hailing him as "arguably the most powerful Hispanic-American in business today."

Inspiring as it may be, Gutierrez's life is hardly a rags-to-riches saga. His father was a successful pineapple merchant in Havana who, in 1960, was deemed an enemy of Fidel Castro's state. As Hispanic Magazine put it earlier this year: "While many Cubans speak of coming to the United States with little more than pocket change and the clothes on their back, Pedro and Olga Gutierrez and their two sons were able to leave with $2,000 and 22 suitcases."

Gutierrez's business acumen appears beyond dispute. He worked his way up from an entry-level delivery and sales job in Mexico City at age 20 to be general manager of Kellogg's Mexican operations at age 30. When he took over the company in 1999, he shifted the measure of success from tons of cereal sold to the value of the products on Kellogg's shelves, Adelman said. Kellogg bought the Keebler cookie company and snapped up diet-conscious Kashi Co. to begin marketing health foods.

Four months into the top job, he announced the closing of the company's cereal plant in its hometown of Battle Creek, Mich., eliminating 550 jobs and plowing the savings into product development and marketing. "That was a very difficult thing to do," Adelman said, "but it was the right thing to do for the company."

Kellogg stock has risen from $30.61 a share when he took over in April 1999 to $45.01 on Friday. It closed at $43.47 a share Monday.

Engler, who as governor of Michigan worked with Gutierrez, said he was a natural choice for commerce secretary. Assignments in Mexico, Asia and Canada exposed Gutierrez to many of the most pressing trade issues. "He is clearly the most international leader that Commerce has ever had," Engler said.

But even admirers expressed bewilderment at his decision to move to the Commerce Department, a hodgepodge agency that controls the Census Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Many of those agencies will probably be on the chopping block when Bush unveils his 2006 budget request in February. Moreover, manufacturers have been pressuring the department to take a firmer stand against international competitors, while the White House presses forward with an aggressive free-trade agenda.