Western Europe: The Old Breed

• Share

As U.S. industry gets into the Common Market, American executives are being thrown into increasingly intimate contact with Europe's managerial class—and are finding it a different breed. European industry, reports University of Wisconsin Professor David Granick. is run by a species of businessman almost extinct in the U.S.—men bound by strict traditions of social class, aloof toward subordinates, and profoundly skeptical of the U.S. notion that corporate management is a separate branch of knowledge that can be learned in business school.

In most of Europe, reports Granick in his new book. The European Executive (Doubleday; $4.95), a man's social background and schooling largely determine whether he can hope to reach the top in business. In France, an executive who aspires to head a major corporation must not only be a man of broad general culture but should also hold an engineering degree from Paris' blue-ribbon Ecole Polytechnique. (Of 15 top French corporation chiefs interviewed by Granick, eight were Polytechnique graduates.) Ideally, a French executive should "parachute" into business only after several years in the higher ranks of the civil service—partly because this ensures that he will have close contacts among the government officials who can do so much to help his company with their decisions on taxes, tariffs and government loans.

The Risk-Takers. In Belgium a top executive commands more social prestige than the most successful politician. But his incentive is somewhat stifled by the fact that he is expected to spend all his adult life with one company or risk being branded a job-hopper. In Germany the word "manager" has a disreputable ring and tends to be associated with boxing promoters; real status in German business is reserved for the Unternehmer, the risk-taking owner-entrepreneur. So addicted is Germany to the family-operated enterprise that some wealthy German families retain the power to fire the chief executive of corporations in which they have long since abandoned their controlling interest.

Britain's businessmen, says Granick, are regarded more or less as second-string civil servants. This lack of prestige, together with moderate salaries and no stock options, has traditionally discouraged the ablest graduates of Britain's public schools and universities from managerial careers. Consequently, fewer than one-third of Britain's top executives today have a university degree, and a surprising number are poor boys up from the industrial ranks.

The Perquisites. Contrary to the general impression, Granick found that European executives work at least as long hours as their U.S. counterparts—and are no better paid. On average, the vice president of a medium-sized European company draws only six to nine times as much salary as a factory hand. But there are other perquisites. The Continental executive very likely enjoys a two-hour lunch and the use of a company car. He is actively discouraged from spending his leisure time on charity drives or community projects. And in France and Belgium a junior executive is seldom expected to live on his salary, because he commands enough social prestige so that he can generally find a wife with a sizable dowry.