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Andre\ )onald Wenze

22nd July 1960, Page 30
22nd July 1960
Page 30
Page 31
Page 30, 22nd July 1960 — Andre\ )onald Wenze
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

AQUIET American came from India to Britain by way of the British Empire, arriving at the imposing Firestone factory At the Great West Road, Brentford, Middx, in the torrid summer of last year. He hoped-indeed, expected—to find a pleasant transitional climate. As it turned out, he says, the only difference between London and Bombay was that in Bombay he enjoyed the

amenity of air conditioning. .

But within the factory, Andrew Donald Wenzel, the new chairman andmanaging director of the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Co., Ltd., found little to suggesthe was no longer in Bombay—or, for that matter, in Wisconsin. For the world-wide Firestone plants operate on a master plan conceived in the United States. In whatever Firestone plant an executive finds himself, he is on familiar ground: production system, office organization, sales, all the essential parts of the organism are identical. There is little room for trial and error outside the organization . and methods division at headquarters. Overseas factories solve the problems of production and sales by a well-tried key. and, by the same token, without temptation to go wandering off at a tangent.

What is the popular British picture of an up-to-date American plant? Is it one of hard-faced management, of brusque hiring and firing, of labour-saving automation, of split-second timing on the production line, of office staff who cower—or fawn, according to temperament—at the approach of authority, of peremptory, cigar-chewing senior executives? If this is the picture, it is as wide of the mark as most other Hollywood projections of the American way of life. " Of course, American management is efficient, and, of course, automation is an essential—and accepted—means of production. But I have never met a senior American executive who smokes, let alone chews, a cigar during an interview, whether in the United States or in Britain. And in all the American-owned plants I have visited in the U.S.A. or elsewhere, I have never been conscious of anything but happy staff relations.

I put the point about efficiency to Mr. Wenzel. How do Britain's production methods compare with America's? He thinks it a missing of the point to say that America's methods are better in this or that field than the British. Very high wages in the United States compel a high degree of mechanization.

A Matter of Degree

This American economic condition is different in degree, though not in kind, frOm the British. Wages have not soared so high here as across the North Atlantic, but they have risen steeply. And production for modern world markets, involving acute competition, means that one country's plants must, in ways suited to their own economic and social climate, be just as efficient as another's. Increasing automatic production has not involved unemployment in America, says Mr. Wenzel, for the reason that the market is continually expanding. Moreover, labour is mobile. It may be a source of generations-old bitterness that South Wales miners were compelled to leave their valleys in the 1920s to seek work in foreign England: an American thinks nothing of pulling up his New England stakes and lighting out for California, 3,000 miles away.

All of this is really a portrait of Mr. Wenzel. He represents in his personality and experience the new-type American who carries his country's commercial and industrial methods overseas and by so doing benefits the whole world's prosperity. He is one of the new internationalists who have learnt by experience how to get along with people of various races, abilities, points of view and prejudices. According to his colleagues at Akron, he is even losing his American accent!

British Methods Admired He arrived in Bombay from the United States as long ago as 1939. He stayed long enough to see India become an independent country within the British Commonwealth of Nations. In that long and eventful period he grew an admiration for British administration no less warm than he later conceived for Indian governmental and business methods. • "The old Indian Civil Service," he declares "was undoubtedly the best in the world." He has nothing but praise for the way India was equipped with Indians of high administrative calibre by the former British public servants.

His views about India's treatment of foreign-owned industry are as encouraging. There is no difficulty, he says, about repatriation of capital or export of dividends: no difficulty about training labour or recruitment of highgrade executives.

Does it matter what he thinks about India now he has come to Britain? I believe it does. Even the British cannot understand themselves until they see what their fellow countrymen accomplished, and still accomplish, overseas. Americans who se neither the English at home nor the British abroad can have little idea what we are like. Donald Wenzel, the quiet American who does not chew cigars (though he smokes cigarettes uninhibitedly) has got off to a good start here. He is going to make a lot of friends, if only because he is showing himself friendly. America could do with many more Americans like him—and so

could we, H.C.


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