Enter Dieter Schmeier, a 29-year veteran of Schering and a native German. As top managers wrestled with the company's lack of diversity in its main operations, Schmeier, an organizational psychologist, stepped back from the problem. He enrolled in a management program at Harvard. For four months, he lived in a dorm with eight other executives, and he and they were expected to tackle class assignments together. Two of them were from the United States, and one each came from Australia, Canada, China, India, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Schmeier had never been part of such a diverse team and was skeptical of the value of mixing people so thoroughly. The routine seemed hard -- and not only because he had to work in English, the native language of nearly everyone else in his group. He also found that the Americans (and, to a surprising degree, the Australian, Canadian, and Indian participants) reached decisions very quickly -- even too quickly. "They are hip shooters," he says. "We [Germans] are more analytical. We're more logical and systematic."

As the months went by, Schmeier began to realize that Harvard was "very clever to bring together people with very different backgrounds." His outlook on mixing began to shift -- from disbelief that mere cohabitation could do much to promote understanding to positive attraction to the ideal of mixing. He understood what many Americans take for granted: the power of diversity.

Schmeier's insight fired his imagination: Could Schering do, on a grander scale, what Harvard had done? When he returned to Germany, he was a man possessed: Mixing matters, he told people.

They started to listen. Schering's board asked Schmeier to draw up a plan for hybridizing the company. He made a radical proposal that boiled down to this: Get the best people, wherever they are and no matter what country they are from. This idea represented a dramatic change from company practice. Schering limits job contests by country. Thus, when a marketing post in Berlin comes open, only Germans learn of it. Similarly, only Japanese employees would be up for a Tokyo job. The system effectively makes mixing impossible.

Schmeier wanted that system scrapped. He argued that Schering should not only open up competition for its jobs but also circulate more of its foreign talent. Nearly 95% of its executives working outside their home country were German. As a result, not only couldn't Americans win rotations into Germany; they couldn't win rotations anywhere. "We have to change this imbalance," Schmeier urged. "It's absolutely necessary."

Schmeier made another key point: Employees should circulate more frequently, despite the extra cost. Drawing on his Harvard experience, he insisted that it was through a critical mass of associations with strangers that people really grow -- that reaching a threshold of experience in several places is more important than simply getting to know one new place. "If they stay too long in one country," he says, "then the idea to make a person multicultural gets lost. Then we will be helping a German become an American or a Frenchman. That's not the idea."

The board approved Schmeier's plan. Yet many barriers remain. Employees must be encouraged to move. Their new jobs must be attractive. Middle managers must grow enthusiastic about the vision, because, in the end, they make most hiring decisions. They are the ones who must work alongside strangers after decades of working only with their own kind. Schmeier cannot predict how quickly this change will happen, although he believes that his company's future depends on it.

So he remains possessed of a vision of tomorrow caught in the claws of the present. "Today, if we have a vacancy," he says, "we maybe think of three names: Muller, Schmidt, Lagenstein. What we have in mind in future is to have a different set of names: Smith, Lee Ping, Rodriguez. That is the idea."*

G. Pascal Zachary (gregg.zachary@wsj.com) is a London-based senior writer for the "Wall Street Journal." This article is drawn from his forthcoming book, "The Global Me" (Public Affairs, July 2000). (Radha Basu left Hewlett-Packard in 1999 to become CEO of Support.com, an Internet-solutions company in Redwood City, California.)

From the forthcoming book "The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competetive Edge -- Picking Globalisms Winners and Losers," by G. Pascal Zachary, to be published this month by Public Affairs. Copyright by G. Pascal Zachary. All rights reserved.

Sidebar: United States of Diversity

People can argue about what makes a 50-mile stretch of northern California so successful. But certainly no one can argue that Silicon Valley is a monoculture. It has become a poster child for the power of mongrelization; the mixing of people is central to its success. "If you subtracted that," says Anna Eschoo, a member of Congress who represents the area, "the Valley would collapse." Indeed, at least one-third of the Valley's scientists and engineers are immigrants. They come from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and, in particular, Asia. Since 1980, Chinese and Indian immigrants alone have founded 2,700 companies, which in turn employ 58,000 people.