Word: switzerland
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...Matterhorn, Switzerland's best-known mountain, is also one of its hardest to climb, requiring peak fitness and experience using crampons and ropes at high altitudes. That didn't deter Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, 58, the chief executive of Nestle, who has been mountaineering in the Alps since he was a child. He fulfilled a lifelong ambition last summer by reaching the 14,692-ft. summit. "It was just perfect," he says, his eyes sparkling at the memory...
...Nestle's case, the risks lurk literally everywhere. The company dates back to 1867--when Henri Nestle started selling a cereal he had invented for infants--and is still based in his hometown, Vevey, Switzerland, on Lake Geneva. But it has long outgrown its Swiss roots and is today perhaps the most multinational of multinationals. Its products are available in almost every nation in the world, and its executive board is made up of two Americans, two Austrians, a Briton, a Dutchman, a German, a Mexican, two Spaniards and a Swede. Yet its corporate culture remains firmly grounded...
Vasella came late to the business world but was introduced early to illness and adversity. Born in 1953 in Fribourg, Switzerland, the son of a history professor and the youngest of four children in a Catholic household, Vasella developed asthma at 5, then fell ill with tuberculosis and meningitis at 8, each time spending a year away from home in recovery. He was 10 when his eldest sister died of cancer; three years later, his father died from complications after surgery. But the accidental death in 1982 of his second sister, who had attended medical school with him, was most...
...long. In 1993 Vasella returned to Switzerland to head corporate marketing at Sandoz headquarters in Basel. The next year he briefly led the company's global drug-development programs, and he was its chief operating officer before becoming CEO of its drug business, reporting to the chairman of the conglomerate, Marc Moret--his wife's uncle. Vasella applied the lessons he had learned while managing Sandostatin to all the company's drug-development efforts. When Sandoz announced in 1996 that it would merge with its rival across the Rhine, Ciba-Geigy, Vasella was named CEO of the new company...
Basel is in some ways the Houston of Switzerland: one industry overshadows all the others, and the zoning is haphazard. In Basel it isn't unusual to see a modern glass-and-steel monstrosity amid a row of elegant 19th century neoclassical buildings. The Rhine plies a serpentine course through the city, and Novartis' headquarters are at the river's edge, at a point where France, Germany and Switzerland meet. Across the Rhine from Novartis and a little to the east, marked by a tall white smokestack, is rival Roche. The pharmaceutical execs in Basel know one another, and they...