Irish doom and gloom a case of deja vu for German success story

WILD GEESE: Liam Condon: Managing Director, Bayer HealthCare Germany

WHEN NAVAN Road native Liam Condon reads the Irish news from his office in Germany, it’s like deja vu all over again.

The headlines of rising unemployment and emigration remind the 42-year-old of his days studying international marketing and languages at NIHE, later Dublin City University, in the 1980s.

Then, facing similarly dim prospects, he decided to spend a year studying in Berlin in 1987, “when the wall was still there and the city was still exciting”.

His scholarship at Berlin’s Technical University became an unplanned sojourn at the university of life, thanks to a student strike lasting most of his stay. However he learned German and returned regularly and was even here when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

“There was real euphoria for a year, then the cold shower, a huge discussion about what it was all costing and that things would never grow together,” he says. “It has gone on until today and we’re still paying the (unification) tax.”

He had returned to Dublin to finish his degree, returned to Berlin to look for work and landed at pharmaceuticals company Schering. After Siemens and other companies fled Berlin and the Red Army in 1945, Schering was the only one to stay put, something Berliners have never forgotten.

After six years, he moved with the company to Japan in 1996.

“For the first three months, I was in a little town in the middle of nowhere where no one spoke English, living with a family and experiencing all their interesting rituals,” he says. “The mother of the house was beautician for all the geishas in the area.”

After Japan, and another five Berlin years as marketing director for the Asia-Pacific region, he moved to Shanghai. When Bayer swallowed Schering in 2006, Condon feared the worst.

“Bayer is four times bigger than Schering so I was pretty sure I’d be packing my bags,” he explains.

The new owners though were impressed with the performance of their marathon-running multilingual manager – as well as English and Irish he speaks German, French, Japanese and Mandarin – and they promoted him to be managing director for China. On his watch, the China business’s annual growth averaged between 40 and 50 per cent, something that got him noticed back home.

Last January he was made head of Bayer HealthCare in Germany, a key part of Bayer’s €15 billion global healthcare business that sells everything from from Aspirin to diabetes medication. He is also responsible for Germany’s Bayer Schering Pharma division.

After two decades in the pharmaceutical business, Condon has come to the iconic company at a time of profound change.

For the first time in its 140-year history, the pharmaceutical giant has appointed an outside candidate – a non-German to boot – to be chief executive from October.

“A few years ago it would have been unthinkable and, with over 70,000 Germans in the company, it wouldn’t be hard to find another qualified German,” says Condon.

It’s not just Bayer that is changing: from Siemens to Allianz, Germany’s big companies are diversifying their management in an effort to stay ahead on global markets. Doors once closed to non-Germans are now opening.

“Clearly there are opportunities here for Irish people with skills in Germany, particularly with companies that export who are highly dependent on people with broader perspectives, and not just Germans.”

Over the years Condon has heard all the cliches about his adoptive home – boring, no-fun people and a language reputedly difficult to learn – but he says the country has opened up dramatically in the last years.

“For me it was a purely rational decision to learn German and move here, but my decision to stay is purely emotional, based on the quality of life here.”

That’s a crucial issue for the married father of two. It’s a comfort to know too that, despite recent change, German companies have not all morphed into cost-obsessed, hire-fire agencies but remain committed employers.

He cites Bayer as an example.

In the middle of last year’s economic meltdown, it agreed with the company works council on a redundancy moratorium until 2012. It is also as committed as ever to its football team, Bayer Leverkusen. “Promising not to fire anybody in the middle of a huge economic crisis . . . says a lot about the long-term mentality here,” he says.

In Germany, he sees the approach to work and life as “more evolutionary than revolutionary; the emphasis is on stability and fairness”.

The subject of last weeks Wild Geese was named incorrectly. Colm Murphy is general manager of Servier pharmaceuticals in Poland