Cross-Cultural Research Teams in a Global Enterprise

At the beginning of 1986, Rhone-Poulenc was a large, unfocused chemical company with more than 100 different businesses. Eighty percent of our sales were in Europe, most of our employees were French, and our small American manufacturing subsidiary served primarily as a trading company selling French-made products. Then, in June 1986, Jean-Rene Fourtou left France's leading consulting firm to become chief executive officer of the then-nationalized chemical company. He set us on a course to become a global company that would rank among the world's top five producers of specialty chemicals and life-science products. He also challenged us to significantly strengthen our market share in the United States, the world's largest market for chemicals. Since then, in order to achieve the necessary critical mass, We have made acquisitions in a number of key areas, with 18 of these acquisitions in the United States. Today, North America accounts for 26 percent of worldwide sales. When Rhone-Poulenc acquired 68 percent of the Rorer pharmaceuticals group in 1990, to form Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, the chairman's strategic voyage was virtually complete. He had strengthened the portfolio in life sciences, made Rhone-Poulenc a factor in specialty chemicals and balanced its lopsided geographic skew. In the process, the company went from ranking 12th among the world's chemical companies in the early 1980s to seventh at the start of the 1990s. And, with the Rorer acquisition, it had given itself an even larger platform from which to launch the next round of growth--in Asia. But achieving global size doesn't assure global success. It takes much more. It takes coordination and integration on a human scale. I joined Rhone-Poulenc in the middle of 1987, in between two major acquisitions: Union Carbide's Agricultural Products Co. and the Stauffer Chemicals basic chemicals business. When I arrived, my orders were simple: Make the American subsidiary, Rhone-Poulenc Inc., a success. And that involved more than expanding sales in the United States. It also meant building a local organization, establishing an identity and creating an American Rhone-Poulenc culture out of the smorgasbord of acquisitions. Technical Teams on a Worldwide Scale The first challenge, therefore, was to integrate the diverse U.S. operations, which also were overlaid with French management. We have a total of 780 R&D people worldwide: 568 in Europe, 176 in North America, 20 in South America, and 16 in Asia. In some respects, our researchers from America and Europe started out at separate poles, with major barriers to overcome. But gradually, we started to understand our differences and work together toward shared objectives. Our director of research at the time, Maurice A. Raymond, formed a U.S. technical council that included members from Specialty's core technologies (surfactants, lasers, water-soluble polymers, food ingredients and others), along with a representative from process engineering, a member of the patent department and a manufacturing/project engineer. This group, which still meets regularly, gradually built a productive working relationship based on personal interaction and rapport. We then set about creating technical teams on a worldwide scale, also based on the core technologies, specifically for textile sizing, surfactants, latex polymers, and defoamers. In the process, we found that U.S. and French researchers tend to have different perspectives about their work. Americans are generally pragmatic, oriented to creating something that will be used, and expected to develop products that will be sold. The French, on the other hand, tend to be more interested in the pure science, deriving satisfaction through finding solutions to knotty technical problems. British researchers, by the way, tend to approach their work the way Americans do. And, of course, the full range of similarities and differences will be found among scientists from other countries. …