It was the summer of 2000.
Pierre Dufour had recently taken over as president and CEO of American Air Liquide Holdings Inc. and was dealing with a company
that had become unzipped from its parent, Paris-based Air Liquide.
Some business segments can become detached from the parent company over time as they drift away from the focus and the vision
that the parent company laid out for them.
There are technical terms business analysts use to describe a wayward company, but when Dufour faced the situation at American Air
Liquide, the analogy was as basic as fastening a jacket.
“The zipper was open, and I had to figure out how to bring the zipper back up tooth by tooth,” Dufour says. “I did it by creating bridges,
either by benchmarking exercises or by exchanging people or by building bridges at the working level so I could pull the zipper back
shut again.”
The company had drifted to the point that it was becoming a counterproductive segment of its parent company. Sales were lagging, the
value of each sale was dropping, and most alarmingly to Dufour, the lines of communication between North America and Europe were
withering.
Dufour says the key for the Houston-based industrial and medical gas supplier with more than $2 billion in annual revenue was to refocus on innovation and strengthen partnerships with its European counterparts.
To begin that process, Dufour had to get Air Liquide’s U.S.-based and Europe-based engineers to start talking to each other again.
