The French academic Marc-Daniel Seiffert published a book last spring
that retraces the fascinating history of Eurocopter. Marc’s book(1), which took
him three years to complete, also analyzes the strategies that have led
the company to become the world’s number one helicopter manufacturer.
The author talked to Rotor Journal about his reasons for writing the book.
What made you want to write this book?
Marc-Daniel Seiffert: Serious studies of corporate
history are almost totally lacking in France, and my initial
goal was therefore to piece together all the facts
and compile a faithful history of Eurocopter.
Following the example of Alfred Chandler(2), I also
wanted to use an inductive, historical and fieldworkbased
approach in order to validate or discredit certain
theories on the emergence of strategies, the
different learning processes, and the acquiring of
skills. The difficulty is that lots of skills are not codified;
they are transmitted informally from generation to generation
over the years through a tacit learning process.
I wanted to demonstrate how organizations learn
things over time and, more importantly, how they learn
from their setbacks.
Why did you choose Eurocopter?
M.-D. S.: About ten years ago, I decided to do a doctoral
thesis on Eurocopter’s technological strategy and
cooperation policy. The success of this bi-national
company was completely counterintuitive, and I found
that interesting. Nowhere was it written in the books
that it would become a world leader one day. After the
Second World War, the helicopter was a new form of
technology and American industry, with its huge captive
market, took a very early lead. The Eurocopter
story is an example of unexpected success, based on
proactive management with a long-term vision.
Politically, there was almost total agreement that the
country must have a competitive industry.
What lessons did you learn from your
research?
M.-D. S.: The first lesson was methodological: Just as
you have to understand a company’s history to understand
its success, you won’t be able to solve its problems
without understanding its products and people.
This flies in the face of more formal approaches, which
use over-simplified hypotheses and ready-made formulas
that are based on unrealistic mathematical
models.
