Antidote for Blunders

Almost a decade ago, Georges Hereil, then head of France's Sud-Aviation and now president of Simca, found to his frustration that selling abroad is beset with problems. Slid had two products in worldwide demand--the Caravelle jet and the Alouette helicopter. But Hereil had almost no aides capable of coping with the global market. "It was really difficult," he says, "to find executives who understood how to deal with people from other countries." Out of that experience has grown a nonprofit business school with the novel purpose of training rising managers of international companies in how to avoid money-losing blunders in foreign lands.

It took Hereil seven years to round up enough backing to finance his idea. At first, corporate executives guardedly asked who else was involved. That resistance ended only after an American expatriate millionairess named Isabelle Kemp chipped in the first $80,000. Finally, Hereil recruited a multinational team of educators.

Last week the school, called the International Executive Training Center and bankrolled by 39 U.S. and European corporations, graduated its first class. It was a cosmopolitan group, made up of 17 high-level management men (average age: 42) from 14 companies in ten different countries. Among them: Chrysler International's controller, Fiat's man in Cairo, the assistant to the president of Spain's Barreiros Diesel, officials from France's Credit Lyonnais, Britain's Rolls-Royce, the U.S.'s IBM and Sweden's Saab.

A Lesson in Breathing. The setting for their studies was pure French romantic; the spired Chateau de Mercues, a medieval castle recently converted to a luxury hotel. It stands on a hilltop overlooking the sleepy little town of Cahors in southwestern France near Hereil's country home. The ten-week, six-hour-a-day course (with a tab of $3,000 plus the price of meals for each executive and his wife), was something of a smorgasbord. It mixed Europe's theoretical pedagogy with the case-study methods of U.S. business schools. French and U.S. instructors, including two men from the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, delved into everything from the unity of man to the technology gap and international monetary liquidity. Twenty-three business bigwigs lectured as visiting professors, among them, top men from Volkswagen and Renault who explained why their companies have respectively succeeded and failed in the U.S. auto market. There was even a lesson by a white-haired German psychologist. Count Karlfried Von Durckheim, on how to breathe properly--according to the Japanese "Hara" discipline.

Despite some reservations about the arcane portions of the curriculum, most of the class lauded the school. "What I have learned here," said West German Banker Dietrich Herzog, "is that European integration is not only possible but absolutely necessary. Of all Europeans, the French need this sort of exposure the most." Said Norwegian Leif Kristoffersen, production manager of Scandinavian Airlines System: "I had always considered Spain a very rigid and autocratic country. But from what the two Spaniards here say, it simply cannot be that sort of place." Such understanding is roughly what Hereil had in mind all along. "We want to make business more human," he says. At mellow Mercues, with its convivial banter and fireside chats, Hereil figures he has made a good start in that direction.

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