Britain: For the Yankee Dollar

U.S. corporations have often found it difficult to recruit top foreign talent for their overseas executive suites. Lately, however, laboring for the Yankee dollar has begun to lose its stigma. Last week, in one of the year's more remarkable personnel coups. International Business Machines landed the Earl of Cromer, former governor of the Bank of England, as chairman of its subsidiary IBM United Kingdom holdings.

"What attracted me," said Lord Cromer, 49, "was the international aspect of the company. My job will be concerned with the broader policy issues." On both counts, the prescription fits his talents. As the youngest head of the Bank of England in two centuries, Cromer earned a reputation as an acerbic critic of Tory and Labor governments alike during his five-year (1961-66) governorship. His stature among bankers was enormous—and helped to raise the rescue funds overnight when eleven nations, including the willing U.S., came to the defense of the British pound at its moment of greatest peril in 1964.

After leaving the Bank of England, Cromer returned to his first love, as a managing director of Baring Brothers, oldest (established 1763) and among the most powerful of British merchant banking dynasties. Cromer will keep that job, and his new associates should profit from the Establishment connection. Though IBM dominates computer-making in the U.S. and the rest of Europe, it has snared only about a third of the British market.