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The major complaint against U.S. firms, however, is that they have an overwhelming lead in technology and are often reluctant to share it. The pace of U.S. research and development stuns and frightens other nations. In the U.S., 700,000 people work at R & D for industry v. 187,000 in next-most-active Japan. U.S. corporations allot $21 billion to research, six times what the Common Market spends. Americans can also be terrifyingly ingenious. Ford, creating Ford Europe, linked engineering centers at Dunton, England, and Cologne to Detroit by telephone cable in order that designers abroad could use the Dearborn computer.
Sympathetic to such protests, U.S. companies have begun to share technology. IBM has assigned two important projects to its European laboratories, a cheaper, faster computer memory system and a more flexible programming language, in order to develop their skills. Jersey's Esso Research recently opened a 50-acre center in Brussels where scientists from eleven nations will work together. "We won't have done our job," says President Erving Arundale, "until American consumers are using products that we have developed here in our European labs."
Americans also feel that other nations could do more to pull up their technological socks. "It surprises us in the U.S.," Chase Manhattan Chairman David Rockefeller bluntly told a Paris meeting of businessmen, "that you pay relatively little attention to management training and to training in some of the newer scientific disciplines. The American advantage comes not so much from the discovery of new ideas and methods as from their application. It has to do basically with capabilities in management, engineering and marketing, in short, the willingness to take risks and to accept the change."
If Europeans find Americans efficiently cold, Americans for their part often find Europeans dismayingly disorganized. Says ITT Executive Vice President Tim Dunleavy: "To counteract the long, lean, hungry guys coming in, a European company tries to merge with another European company. But that only adds to the difficulty. You get two overstaffed, overweight companies getting together, and you're making the problem twice as serious as it was in the first place. That sort of action makes them more prey than ever to American companies, but a lot of businessmen and politicians still don't recognize this."
Marks, Rupees, Eurodollars. One criticism U.S. businessmen do listen to—if not always sympathetically—is Washington's complaint about the effect of globalization on the U.S. balance of payments. "The European splurge," says Assistant Commerce Secretary for International Business Lawrence Mc-Quade, "was an example of American businessmen losing their heads about a market. Their massive investment triggered the voluntary payments program." Under this voluntary program, 625 U.S. corporations, including Jersey Standard, are making "special efforts" to repatriate income from abroad more rapidly and to borrow more money abroad.