Chairman and CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, gestures during the annual shareholders meeting of the Swiss based giant food company in Lausanne.
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In 1967, during a summer vacation from business school in Vienna, Brabeck traveled to Pakistan with a group of friends to climb Tirich Mir, the highest peak in the Hindu Kush. They drove through Turkey and Afghanistan in a secondhand van and slept in tents their mothers had sewn. The expedition turned into a disaster. In bad weather two of the team, including Thomassen, fell off an ice wall to their deaths. Brabeck survived because he had returned to base camp the day before the tragedy: there had been only enough food for two, and he lost the poker game that had decided which of the three would turn back. The experience changed his life and continues to influence his management. "When you lose your best friends in such an expedition," he says, "it makes you more aware of the relativity of the risks but also of the relativity of the individual."
Back in Austria, he abandoned plans to earn a doctorate, joined Findus and was soon posted to Chile. President Salvador Allende was then in power trying to implement his "Chilean road to socialism," and Brabeck recalls spending much of his time trying to dissuade government officials from nationalizing milk production. He also had to deal with militant labor officials on the factory floor who could bring operations to a standstill.
One of the highlights of his posting was the day Fidel Castro introduced him to cigars. It was in September 1972, he recalls, at a trade fair in Santiago. The Cuban exhibitors needed refrigerators for their shrimp. Brabeck lent them some. When the fair opened, Castro came over with a box of smokes to say thank you. But the Cuban leader's biggest gift, Brabeck says, was to warn Allende of the problems Cuba had encountered when it nationalized milk. That gave Nestle valuable breathing space.
Brabeck was called back to Switzerland in 1975, and after the turbulence he had just lived through, "Vevey seemed as boring as hell," he recalls. Within three months, barely enough time to hang the curtains and find a school for the eldest of his three children, he was on a plane back to Chile along with his family, this time as Nestle's local marketing director. Three other executives had turned down the job, nervous about the political turmoil. Brabeck jumped at it.
Something similar happened five years later. Brabeck returned to Switzerland as deputy head of the Latin American division, expecting to settle down in Vevey for three to five years. But within weeks, there was a management crisis in Ecuador, and he was parachuted in to become the new general manager. This time his Chilean-born wife refused to go with him. She stayed in Switzerland with the children, and she and Brabeck divorced. But there too Brabeck showed his famous persistence. Ten years later, on his 50th birthday, the couple remarried.