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Daring to Be Different. Innovations like Esso Europe fascinate Jersey executives because Haider, as a 38-year veteran of a longtime conservative company, might have been expected to go by the well-thumbed company book. But in the course of his career, Haider has often dared to be different; living in an Oklahoma oil camp in the 1930s, he was the only employee who stubbornly refused to cut his lawn at company orders, and was nearly fired for it.
Haider was born on a North Dakota wheat farm, moved with his family to California as a teenager. He got his chemical-engineering degree at Stanford University ('27), before long was working for a Jersey affiliate called Carter Oil, where one of his early laboratory assignments was to check the quality of helium gas for use in dirigibles. Jersey prefers that its men not put down roots, and Iron Mike never really has. He bounced around the Southwest, moved from New York to Florida to Canada, where in 1947, as Imperial Oil's production boss, he brought in the Leduc oil field that made western Canada independent of oil from Texas and Louisiana.
Haider today is a combination of grit and polish. He hates cold weather from his tours in Canada, speaks acceptable Spanish from his connections with Latin America. He enjoys opera, frequently attends performances in New York with U.S. Steel Chairman Roger Blough, another buff. On business trips, he likes to get up a Cajun card game known as Bouree, a variety of pitch in which pots get increasingly more costly. He seldom loses at Bouree, but he can afford it if he does. For running its global empire, Jersey Standard last year paid him $395,833 in salary and bonuses. He is a devoted family man, but he is so anxious to keep his personal life out of the public eye that he does not even list his wife and daughter in Who's Who.
The Third Power. Haider, and chief executives like him, will be needing all the polish they can muster in the year ahead. The pace of U.S. globalization is so vigorous that other nations are increasingly concerned and cantankerous about it. "Actually," says Csf.'s Danzin, "there is no European government strong enough to prevent an American company from dominating a market." Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber, whose book The American Challenge describes the problem and has become a runaway bestseller on the Continent, prophesies: "The third industrial power, after the U.S. and the Soviet Union, could easily be in 15 years not Europe but American industry in Europe. Even today, in the ninth year of the Common Market, the organization of this market is essentially American."
Europeans, and others, often resent what they consider American arrogance. "However much I like the Americans," says a Dane, "I must admit that they suffer from a kind of superman mentality." Europeans also resent the fact that U.S. firms deal brusquely or not at all with trade unions, discontinue such traditions as the German breakfast break on company time or the Spanish siesta, and, unlike paternalistic European firms, lay off workers in recessions. When ITT recently considered buying Belgium's second best football team in order to get its stadium for employee recreation, cynical Belgians quickly predicted that ITT would undoubtedly cut the team from eleven players to nine.