40s and 50s Memories
All Soul's Day in Quito. Family members take their food
offerings to their deceased relatives in a cemetery
A land of many plenty's! Plenty of oil, minerals,
agriculture, livestock and above all plenty of
self-perpetuating barons ensuring that all the
wealth was jealously guarded for their benefit.
Unfortunately Philips also accumulated wealth,
a wealth of mismanagement, leading to heavy
financial losses tempered by fiscal engineering.
Eventually Eindhoven understood that one
cannot run a business based on the liberal
consumption of whiskey, even though it was
Chivas Regal, and the CEO was replaced, and
more than half of the company top executives
were laid off.
Further spells in Eindhoven, with much to
and froing deepened my relationship with
Dutch culture and its bitter winter, by langlauffing down
the Bosdijk to Head Office and
by recourse to Jonge Genever and Underberg;
but the language and certain delicacies such as
paling stayed near the back burner.
Then another major change, a posting to
apartheid-ridden South Africa. How does one
sum up activities in such an active and brief
thirteen months? We enjoyed a heady mix of
business, sport and tourism, albeit in an unreal
and closeted environment. Today we have a
young virile country, emerging from social and
economic unbalance, into a constructive post-
apartheid period, for which we owe massive
thanks to Mandela. South Africa now has the
further responsibility to lead, and to demonstrate
to many a central and southern African country
how successfully to run an economy.
We then arrived in Madrid in 1980, and soon
felt at home with the attempted coup of 1981.
Shades of Latin America and Africa! That famous shout "Todos al suelo!" ("Hit the deck!")
by the pistol waving Lt. Colonel Tejero rings still
in our ears. The changes in Spain that followed
1980 to this day are enormous, both socially
and economically, a chapter of national change
for historians to recount.
The story of Philips during this period is also one
of great change. Inevitably it is with a certain
nostalgia that one observes the downsizing of a
genial giant of more than 10,000 employees to a
compact company of only 800. This unwinding
was painful and upsetting, but answered to a
truth sweeping across Europe. Decentralisation
and the need for business units to react faster to
fast changing markets were the new imperatives
for survival, but only achievable at the cost of
corporate identity and, alas, technical depth.
Incaica ruins known as Machu Picchu with Wayna
Picchu in the background
A very sad event triggered my final transfer, the
drowning of Rob van Graafeiland in a flash
flood, on a motorway in Italy in June 1992. Rob
had just concluded an internal investigation into
some unsavoury economic happenings and
was on the point of reporting his findings to
Eindhoven when this tragic event overtook him.
Sent to replace him, within two weeks of Rob's
death, I was in Milan and imagined sinister
figures and Machiavellian plots in every nook
and cranny. I lived with the maxim "Trust no
one!" (with three exceptions). Three weeks
(which seemed an eternity) later, the new CEO
arrived in Milan. Company history will disclose
that over the next few months there was quite
an executive shake-out, starting with the former
CEO. One conclusion passed on, though still
ignored was: never, but never appoint a local
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