| rauniyar |
Posted
on 27-Apr-04 02:06 PM
This might not matter if it didn't also mean that our long-term competitiveness is threatened by such shortsighted action. Seeking short-term gains, we have sacrificed not just the futures of our enterprises, but also their characters. Often all that's left is the logo.
Here's one example from a jaded reader:
"In 1965, I went to work for Celanese Chemical Company as a Mechanical Engineer. In 1971, I was transferred to their research center in Corpus Christi." This center was never really noted for basic research. Instead, their forte was to really improve a process that had been licensed from some other company and also to figure out how to purify a chemical better than any other company could. As an example, Celanese licensed a process from Monsanto to make methanol. Over a span of many years, the process was drastically improved and the improvements were covered with patents. It got to the point where Monsanto almost couldn't recognize what we had and we greatly outperformed their own plant."
"Each of our chemists was given a little time each week to work on something that caught his/her fancy. One of them came up with a novel approach to the manufacture of acetominophine (Tylenol). This led to the extension of the basic chemistry and on to the
most efficient and cost effective way to manufacture ibuprofen (Advil). Commercial plants were built for both and, at one time, the ibuprofen plant was supplying most, if not all, of the North American and European markets." "Hoechst A.G., who owned Celanese at the time, decided in 1997 that the research center cost too much. They wanted to specialize in pharmaceuticals. A massive layoff followed. The center was kept open, but with a greatly reduced staff. Last year, it was announced that even the little remaining was too expensive and it would be totally shuttered by the end of 2002." "There will be no further research for Celanese on process improvement, new markets, and cheaper ways to
run existing processes, etc. If I owned Celanese stock, I'd sell it because the company will be down the drain in 10 to 15 years."
Think about it. From the perspective of the Hoechst executive who decided to close the Corpus Christi plant AND FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HIS OR HER CAREER,
shutting down that research center was absolutely the right thing to do. It improved the appearance of corporate performance at a cost that won't be felt for years. And when that cost is felt, it won't felt by Hoechst at all, since Celanese has been spun-off and is on its own.
Does current Celanese management even know what they had in that Corpus Christi research center? Probably not, because any sense of corporate history has probably been lost.
We're lucky in the computer industry that the companies are young and many of them are still run by their founders. I may not always agree with what Scott McNealy does as CEO of Sun Microsystems, but I know McNealy understands what Sun is about because he was there at the beginning and built the first few Sun workstations by hand. Certainly, as long as Microsoft and Dell and Oracle and Adobe have been around, there has been a founder at the helm, and it shows. Love them or hate them, at least these companies have identifiable characters.
And sometimes, that combination of technical expertise and business success combines to create something even greater -- an organization that has a love of Learning for its own sake. That's what appears to be Happening at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry handheld e-mail appliance, where three of the top corporate officers have put $120 million of those shrunken Canadian dollars -- their own money, not the company's -- into the study of particle physics.
Maybe there is hope after all.
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