Something in common
When Dufour began his tenure, the U.S. and European wings of Air Liquide were not communicating effectively and they
weren’t even receptive to each other’s ideas.
“We had innovations that were developed in Europe, but because they were developed in Europe, the U.S. team didn’t want to
consider them,” Dufour says. “They said the U.S. market is different.”
Dufour says the first thing any company needs to do when refocusing itself is to create communication channels so ideas are
reaching all areas of the business. The best way to do that is to get your idea people together in the same room.
“For example, we decided to do a large benchmarking exercise on maintenance, and what were the maintenance programs and
protocols,” Dufour says. “We probably had a three- to four-month benchmarking exercise on maintenance. Over the course of
that, the maintenance guys on both sides became buddies, they started to know what the other one was doing, they started to
respect the other guy’s ideas and suddenly the whole thing became a lot more palatable.”
Dufour conducted similar exercises for Air Liquide’s food application group and hydrogen plant managers, bringing one of the
company’s top food application engineers to the United States in an effort to integrate technologies that were being developed
on both sides of the Atlantic.
“For our hydrogen plant managers, we created a forum,” Dufour says. “These guys were put into a network, which was kind of
a virtual forum where they could get together and share their experiences.”
Dufour says that if employees can’t find a common ground when you bring them together, you have to help them search for it.
It’s usually there if you look hard enough.
“What I tried to do is find common areas, whether it’s a common market, a common client, a common operating issue, and create working groups where we are working together and not imposing on one another,” he says.
