Hans W. Becherer

Hans W. Becherer is not a household name the way the men whose surnames hang over the door usually are, he was the seventh chief executive of Deere & Company and the second from outside the founding family, but he ran the green-and-yellow empire through the decade that made it modern ^[1][3]. He took the top job in September 1989, in the long hangover of the 1980s farm-debt crisis that had pushed the industry to the brink, and he handed it off in 2000 to Robert W. Lane with the company larger, more international, and more diversified than it had ever been ^[1][2][3]. Where his predecessor Robert Hanson had fought to keep Deere alive, Deere was, famously, the only major full-line maker that neither changed ownership nor shuttered its core factories through the worst of the crisis, Becherer's assignment was to make it grow again, and to grow it in places John Deere had barely sold a plow ^[4][9].

His whole résumé pointed at that mission. Becherer had joined Deere in 1962 straight out of Harvard Business School as a marketing representative, and almost the entire first half of his career was spent abroad: by 1969 he was running Deere's export operation out of Mannheim, West Germany, and he held a string of marketing and management posts in Europe into the early 1980s ^[1][9]. He was, in other words, an internationalist inside a deeply Midwestern company, and when he reached the chairman's office in May 1990 he set about making Deere look more like the world it sold into ^[1][3]. Under the banner he called "Genuine Value", a program of continuous improvement, quality, and disciplined global growth, Deere pushed into China, India, South America, and the former Soviet republics, hunting for the next generation of mechanizing farmers ^[1][3].

The diversification was just as deliberate. Becherer leaned hard on the businesses that did not rise and fall with the corn price: he built up John Deere Credit, expanded a health-care (HMO) operation, grew construction equipment, and spun lawn-and-grounds-care into its own division, watching that consumer line cross a billion dollars in sales for the first time ^[3][6][7]. He bought Homelite in 1994 to put chainsaws and hand-held power equipment under the Deere umbrella, and Cameco Industries, a sugarcane-harvester maker, in 1998 ^[7]. By 1998 roughly a quarter of Deere's revenue came from outside the United States and nearly half its product mix was non-agricultural, a remarkable reweighting for a firm whose identity was the row-crop tractor ^[1][2][3].

The numbers, for most of the decade, vindicated him. After a $20 million loss in the recession year of 1991, Deere reeled off record results: fiscal 1997 brought a then-record $960.1 million in net income on $12.79 billion of net sales and revenues, and Becherer, who rarely sought the spotlight, credited "strong worldwide demand for the company's products" and "the company's continuous improvement and quality initiatives" ^[3][6][8]. He also poured the company's prosperity back into its hometown: the John Deere Pavilion opened on the Moline, Illinois riverfront in 1997 and became one of the state's top tourist attractions, the visible heart of a downtown-and-riverfront renewal Becherer helped drive ^[1][7]. In 1997 he tied the brand to the PGA Tour, beginning the sponsorship of the John Deere Classic and making Deere the tour's official golf-course-equipment supplier ^[1][7].

His last full year was harder, and it tested the very diversification he had championed. A collapse in farm income, the worst since the 1980s, drove agricultural-equipment demand down hard; worldwide net sales and revenues fell to $11.75 billion in fiscal 1999 from $13.82 billion the year before, and Deere announced aggressive production cutbacks to clear inventory ^[5][8]. Speaking to the Des Moines Rotary Club in May 1999, Becherer framed the slump in the global terms that had defined his tenure, quoting a farmer who had told a Deere internet forum, "The quality of the green tractor is there... The quality of the green money to pay for it isn't" ^[5]. He retired in 2000 having proved both the promise and the limits of his strategy: a global, multi-line Deere could grow faster in good years, but it could not escape the iron weather of the farm cycle ^[3][5].

Hans Walter Becherer was born April 19, 1935, in Detroit, Michigan, a city of machines, though of a very different kind from the ones he would spend his life selling ^[1][2]. He went east for college, graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957, where he was a member of the St. Anthony Hall society ^[2]. Two years in the United States Air Force followed, and then Harvard Business School, where he earned his MBA in 1962 ^[1][2][9].

He joined Deere & Company that same year, 1962, as a marketing representative, the bottom rung of the side of the business he would master ^[1][9]. Almost from the start his path ran through Europe rather than the Illinois corn belt. By 1969 he had been promoted to run Deere's export operation out of Mannheim, West Germany, overseeing sales and distribution across European markets, and he stayed largely overseas, in marketing and management roles, into the early 1980s ^[9]. That long apprenticeship abroad was the making of him: he learned the company as an exporter sees it, from the far end of the supply chain looking back at Moline.

The ascent home was rapid once it began. In 1983 he was elected senior vice president of Deere's Overseas Farm and Consumer Products Division; in 1986 executive vice president for worldwide farm equipment and consumer products; in 1987 president and chief operating officer; and in September 1989 president and chief executive officer ^[1][9]. When Robert Hanson, the first non-family CEO, who had steered Deere through the farm crisis, retired in May 1990, Becherer was elected chairman, uniting both titles in the hands of a man whose formative years had been spent making John Deere a name in Europe ^[1][3][4].

Becherer's decade reset what Deere & Company was. He inherited a survivor, a firm whose green-and-yellow identity had been built over more than a century and a half by the founding Deere family ^[10][4], and turned it into a deliberately global, multi-line industrial company, with a quarter of its revenue from abroad and half its products no longer tied to agriculture ^[1][2][4]. The international push he began, and the diversification into credit, construction, consumer, and turf-care equipment, became the structural shape that his successors Robert Lane and beyond would build the modern Deere upon ^[1][3].

His fingerprints are also literally on the landscape of the Quad Cities. The John Deere Pavilion and the riverfront renewal he championed reanimated downtown Moline, and the PGA Tour partnership he struck in 1997 still carries the company's name onto television every summer ^[1][7]. Honored in his retirement, inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 2004 and named to the Harvard Business School roster of great American business leaders of the twentieth century, Becherer is remembered less as a visionary founder than as the rare professional manager who arrived with exactly the skill his company needed at exactly the moment it needed it, and who used it to carry a venerable American name into global markets and a new century ^[1][2]. He died in Colorado on October 6, 2016, at 81 ^[1].