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Biq Man from Abroad. Along with rotating ambassadors from home, U.S. firms have taken another step long overdue: they are giving more jobs—and more responsible jobs—to non-American executives. As recently as 1965, according to a survey by University of Manchester Professor Kenneth Simmonds, only 59 Europeans were among the 3,733 executives in Europe for 150 U.S. companies. Now the ratio is changing rapidly. The Earl of Cromer, for instance, until recently governor of the Bank of England, is the new chairman of IBM United Kingdom. Dr. Frederick H. Boland, the man who as United Nations General Assembly President broke a gavel in 1960 trying to silence Nikita Khrushchev, is chairman of Esso Ireland. Though names help, such executives are less and less anxious to be figureheads. "If they want a yes-man," says Managing Director Gian-Carlo Salva of Honeywell Italy, "they can get my doorman for $100 a month."
U.S. companies have even begun to switch their non-Americans around.
"Why not?" suggests a U.S. executive in Brazil. "Brains are international."
Eastman Kodak Co. has a Swiss man ager in Italy, a Dutchman in Portugal and a Cuban in Venezuela. SGS-Fair-child, European subsidiary of Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corp., advertises its management staff as "an SGS-Fair-child cocktail: one part Italian, four parts British, one part French, one part Swedish, one part German, served with an American olive."
Esso Europe, at Mike Haider's insistence, was concocted in 1966 as an even more diverse mixture. Picked to head it was an American, Nicholas J. Campbell Jr., 52, who had earlier been in Venezuela for Jersey and in Japan as president of Esso Sekiyu, the Japanese affiliate. Choosing as many capable executives as possible from Europe, Campbell ended up with a mix that includes 121 Americans, four Canadians, one Venezuelan, 86 Britons, 21 Germans, 16 Frenchmen, 14 Italians, ten Belgians, ten Norwegians, nine Swedes, eight Dutchmen, two Danes, two Swiss, one Finn and one Maltese, who all work comfortably together with English as their lingua Esso. Jersey resettled them with even a pamphlet of helpful translations: diapers in England are called nappies, and a hot-water heater is a geyser.
Big Suez & Small. Esso Europe's domain and responsibility include 24 refineries, pipelines stretching 3,000 miles, and research laboratories in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Belgium. So diverse is Jersey that the European company even supervises a nine-acre miniature world near Grenoble, France. There Esso sea captains learn how to handle supertankers that will soon reach 800,000 tons in size by steering 15-ton models around waterways, including a replica of one of the bad bends of the Suez Canal.
The real Suez, closed by war, gave Esso Europe its own shakedown cruise. With Europe cut off from much of its Middle East oil, other sources had to be located rapidly. Campbell diverted Jersey tankers at sea and chartered others, kept the region fueled with a pipeline of ships bringing oil from the Western Hemisphere. At one point Esso's Fawley, England, refinery was handling a mid-American grade of oil called Rocky Mountain Sour that had never before been seen in Europe.