DE Deere and Co

By James R. Hagerty 

Hans Becherer stood out from most of the Midwestern lifers at Deere & Co. Though he grew up in the Detroit suburbs, he was a graduate of the Harvard Business School, drove imported cars and knew his way around the capitals of Europe.

After he became chief executive of the farm-equipment maker in 1989, he spurred investments in China, Brazil and other emerging markets. To help make sales, he made regular trips around the world to meet leaders, including Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, who gave him a bear hug. He won more flexible work rules from unions.

Mr. Becherer (pronounced Becker-er) died Oct. 6 at home in Denver. He was 81 and had esophageal cancer.

Hans Walter Becherer was born April 19, 1935, and grew up in Grosse Pointe, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. Both of his parents were born in Germany, and his father worked as an electrical engineer. Young Hans pumped gas and worked construction in the summer. He earned a history degree in 1957 from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where he was president of a fraternity that he later said was known for wild parties but also held literary discussions.

After joining the Air Force, he served as a supply officer in Germany, near Munich. While there, he bought his first sports car: an Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce.

During a vacation with his sister, Ruth, near St. Tropez, France, he spotted a young Parisian, Michele Beigbeder, who worked as a ballerina and model. He introduced himself. They began dating and married two years later. Her father invited him to a business lunch, where he met a Deere executive.

Returning to the U.S., he enrolled at Harvard Business School. During a summer break, he worked as an intern for Deere. After getting his masters of business administration in 1962, he drove his Renault Dauphine to Moline, Ill., to take a full-time job at Deere at $650 a month.

Soon he was posted to Germany as a sales manager. At times, he had to serve as an intermediary between Germans and Americans. A plant manager from Moline was astounded to see workers on a German shop floor taking beer breaks. He ordered tight restrictions on such breaks, setting off a brief walkout that became known as the Beer Strike.

"The technical people came out of small-town, middle-American factories with very little appreciation for communication sensitivities," Mr. Becherer later told The Wall Street Journal.

As a promising young executive, he was brought back to Moline in 1967 as an assistant to William Hewitt, the company's cosmopolitan chairman who also had attended Harvard and adorned the headquarters with expensive art, including a Henry Moore sculpture. On later postings, Mr. Becherer scoured Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa to find new customers. He was involved in bartering Deere combines for jute in India.

After returning to the head office, he won a series of promotions in the 1970s, when Deere sales boomed, and in the 1980s, when a farming slump forced the company to cut its payroll by more than a third. He rose to chief executive in 1989 and chairman the next year, becoming only the seventh chief of the company founded in 1837 to make steel plows.

Deere, still rattled by the devastating slump of the 1980s, remained in cost-cutting mode, but Mr. Becherer and the board agreed the company couldn't shrink its way to prosperity. So Deere invested in operations in Brazil, China, India and Russia. Mr. Becherer also prodded Deere engineers to overhaul the design of combine harvesters, including by adopting some ideas from competitors, a deeply unpopular notion.

One of his dreams was to build a state-of-the-art training center. It would have been his legacy, alongside the elegant glass-and-steel headquarters built by his early patron, Mr. Hewitt. The board nixed the idea as too costly.

He served on the boards of Allied-Signal Inc., Schering-Plough Corp. and Chase Manhattan Corp. He retired from Deere in 2000.

Not long after his retirement, he golfed with Robert Hanson, his predecessor as CEO, at the Deere Run golf course in Silvis, Ill., where the company sponsored golf tournaments. When a golf course employee didn't recognize him as a Deere grandee, Mr. Becherer was vexed. Mr. Hanson was less surprised. "He doesn't know yet that when you're no longer CEO you go from Who's Who to Who's That?" Mr. Hanson said, according to another colleague who was present.

Adapting to anonymity, Mr. Becherer and his wife spent their later years in Denver to be near their grandchildren. He enjoyed fly fishing and walks with his labradoodle, Bruno.

He is survived by his wife, a daughter, a sister and three grandchildren. A son, Maxime, died in 1998.

Days before his death, after he had already gone into hospice care and was finding it hard to talk, Mr. Becherer got a phone call from Pierre Leroy, a former Deere colleague and longtime friend with whom he had shared Thanksgiving meals and long bike rides. "Pierre," he managed to rasp, "we really had fun, didn't we."

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 28, 2016 10:14 ET (14:14 GMT)

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