Part IThe Story
The stag is hollow. Get one down from its perch, turn it over, and you would find no casting and no solid bronze. What you would find is copper sheet hammered into cast-iron molds, soldered at the seams, and held mid-leap by a metal frame running through the body the way a spine runs through an animal. The W.H. Mullins Company of Salem, Ohio, made these deer between 1893 and 1896. The men who shaped them were German and Hungarian artisans, and nobody kept their names. The antlers are the weakest part of every one.
Charles Deere saw the prototype at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He was the founder's second son and had spent his working life as the company's best salesman. He built the branch houses that sent field intelligence back to Moline, and he understood that a plow company sold a promise as much as it sold steel. He wanted a stag on the roof of every John Deere factory building. About twenty were made, many of them gilded, and they stood over the works like pagan household gods while the twentieth century went past underneath.
They did not age well. In the words of the company's collections manager, they "decayed and were neglected; some were lost, destroyed, or stolen." Copper exposed to weather turns green. Solder gives out. Antlers snap off.
Then, in the early 1990s (the company's own account is no more precise than that), the new chief executive of Deere & Company started a program to find the stags and restore them.
On its face this is a small item, the kind of thing a corporate historian puts in a footnote. It becomes interesting once you look at the man who ordered it. Hans Walter Becherer had a German name and a Detroit birth certificate. He had studied at Trinity College in Hartford and at Harvard Business School, and he had spent roughly twenty years of his career in Sweden and West Germany before coming back to run an Illinois plow company. Forbes, in 1998, called him "thin, patrician-looking." In the same decade that he was retrieving nineteenth-century copper deer from the rooflines of the Midwest, he was pulling the company away from the thing those deer stood for. By 1998 about a quarter of Deere's revenue came from outside the United States, and almost half of its product mix had nothing to do with farming: construction equipment, riding mowers, leaf blowers, a credit operation, a health maintenance organization.
He turned the company into something its founder would not have recognized, and in the same years he went looking for its oldest symbols and repaired them. The record does not say whether he saw any contradiction in that. Perhaps he saw none. Perhaps he thought of the two projects as one.
When the program was done, Deere had fourteen of the original stags. Six now stand in the Quad Cities. One is downtown in Moline, south of River Drive, near a pavilion he also had built.
By the Numbers
The Becherer Decade at Deere
38Years at Deere & Company, 1962–2000
~25%Share of 1998 sales from outside the United States
~50%Non-agricultural share of the product mix by 1998
$1BLawn-and-garden sales, crossed for the first time three years into his tenure
30%Operating profit from construction and consumer goods in 1998, from money-losing businesses seven years earlier
$11.7BNet sales and revenues in fiscal 1999, his last full year
14Original 1890s copper stags recovered and restored
A German Name, a Swedish Desk, a Mannheim Office
He was born in Detroit on April 19, 1935, and he is easy to misread at a distance. The surname is German, the first name could hardly be more so, and the career would eventually run through Stockholm and the Rhine. Still, he was an American, raised in the city that put the country on wheels. He went east to Trinity College in Connecticut, graduated in 1957, and joined St. Anthony Hall, an old literary fraternity of the kind that teaches a young man which fork to use before it teaches him anything else.
He then served in the Air Force. A French trade publication, writing his obituary in 2016, put his time in uniform at two years. After that came Harvard Business School, an MBA in 1962, and a job at a farm-equipment company in Moline, Illinois, the same year. Moline was a town where, by one 1962 count, Deere's seven thousand local employees made up 16 percent of the entire population.
That is the version most sources give. Forbes gave a different one. In November 1998 the magazine described him as "a former Goldman, Sachs investment banker who has been with Deere for 30 years," which would put his arrival around 1968 and imply an earlier life on Wall Street. Every other account, including the company's own obituary language, has him joining Deere in 1962 directly from Harvard. I can't settle the discrepancy from the record. I mention it because it is the kind of detail that follows a certain sort of executive: a man polished enough that journalists assumed he must have come from somewhere grander than the place he actually came from.
What he did first at Deere was leave.
He ran the company's Swedish sales operation. He then ran export at Mannheim, in West Germany, which brings the story briefly back to 1956. That year Deere bought Heinrich Lanz AG, the German tractor maker whose Lanz Bulldog had been a familiar machine on European farms. Deere was buying a foothold on a continent it did not understand, and the Lanz works at Mannheim became, decades later, the plant that builds Deere's 6000-series tractors. Becherer was one of the Americans sent over to make the purchase pay off. He stayed in Europe, in one assignment or another, until the early 1980s.
Twenty years is long enough to absorb a place without meaning to. Becherer learned Europe's farms, which are small, fragmented, and steep. He learned its dealers and its lawns. Most of all he learned what Deere looked like from outside Illinois: one American brand among several, with a color scheme that drew no automatic loyalty.
The founder had followed a similar path in the opposite direction. John Deere was a Vermont blacksmith who went west to Grand Detour, Illinois, in 1836, partly to get away from a bankruptcy. In 1837 he made a self-scouring plow from a Scottish steel saw blade, and the company began. Charles Deere set up branch houses to bring the company news of farms it couldn't see. William Butterworth, Charles's son-in-law, merged eleven factories and twenty-five sales organizations into one company. All of them, in their way, were the people who left and came back with information.
In 1983 Becherer became a vice president and took over the overseas farm and consumer products division. The word consumer sits there in the title, unremarked, a decade before it became the center of his tenure. In 1986 he was promoted to executive vice president for worldwide farm equipment and consumer products. In 1987 he came home.
The Plowman's Palace
It helps to understand the building first.
William Hewitt became Deere's chief executive in the mid-1950s. He wanted a headquarters with architectural ambition, which the company had never had; its buildings had been utilitarian and designed by staff. He consulted his friend Robert McNamara of Ford. He consulted Henry Dreyfuss, the industrial designer who, according to company legend, had boarded a train to Waterloo the same night Deere asked him to restyle its tractors in 1937. Dreyfuss gave Hewitt a packet on two dozen architects and told him that if he wanted "an architect's architect," he should talk to Eero Saarinen.
In August 1956 Hewitt and Saarinen looked at sites around Moline. They borrowed a cherry picker from a local utility so Saarinen could see over the treetops. Hewitt eventually put together four farms, once owned by the Arp, Cundy, Hamerlinck, and Schwenneker families, at about $600 an acre. Saarinen's first design was an inverted concrete pyramid. Hewitt thought it fell short. Within three weeks Saarinen came back with steel buildings set into a wooded ravine.
His associate John Dinkeloo proposed weathering steel. Cor-Ten rusts on purpose: the oxidized surface turns a deep brown that matches tree bark and then stops the corrosion beneath it. Some of Deere's own engineers objected. For decades the company had told farmers to keep their implements out of the rain and their steel away from rust, and now headquarters was going to be clad in the stuff. Saarinen died on September 1, 1961, a few days after the construction contract was awarded. His associates Kevin Roche and Dinkeloo finished the job. The Administrative Center opened on April 20, 1964.
Time magazine said it looked like "some forgotten, gargantuan reaper waiting for the Jolly Green Giant." Allan Temko, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 after the West wing opened, called it "a corporate Versailles." Neither comparison was entirely a compliment, and both were accurate.
— William Hewitt, recalling his wife's words, 1977The most important thing you ever did was to build that building with Eero.
The building made a few odd choices. Executive offices sat on the lower floors, not the top, and a private seventy-seat dining room was set slightly below the waterline of the lake outside. Saarinen designed most of the furniture himself, including desks with built-in telephones. Hewitt and his wife bought the art on their travels: Indonesian carved deer, African prayer scrolls, Middle Eastern tools, later a cast of Henry Moore's Hill Arches on an island in the lake and Grant Wood's Fall Plowing. None of it carried a label. Hewitt decided personally where every piece went. Employees were not allowed to bring their own photographs or diagrams; the collection was to be the only decoration. When the collection grew, the chairmen who followed Hewitt kept adding to it, and by 2000, the year Becherer retired, it numbered 1,600 works under the care of two curators.
So the building Becherer came back to in 1987 had a definite worldview. It was ambitious and coolly controlled. It looked outward, toward Japan and modernism and the art market, while sitting in an Illinois ravine. It was something of a stage set. It was also a monument to a version of the company that was, by the late 1980s, in serious trouble.
Becherer became the third chief executive to run the company from it, after Hewitt and Robert Hanson.
The historian Wayne G. Broehl, in John Deere's Company, his 1984 history, called the headquarters the high point of Hewitt's tenure. He was writing during the worst farm downturn since the Depression, and the timing gave the remark a second meaning. A company that had peaked might reasonably have a monument to the peak.
Coming Home to the Crisis
The 1980s farm crisis does not need much retelling. Interest rates and land values had both run up, and then land values collapsed. The machinery makers went down with their customers, and some did not survive. In June 1981 Deere announced it was considering a five-story educational center at headquarters, a glass dome surrounded by dormitories. It was never built. The company struggled for the rest of the decade. The 1986–87 labor strike sits in the company's history as a dated entry. In January 1987 the Chicago Tribune reported that Caterpillar, across the river in Peoria, was closing three plants. Over that decade at least six of Deere's tractor competitors merged, were sold, or disappeared.
Becherer returned that year as president and chief operating officer under Hanson. He became chief executive in 1989. In May 1990 Hanson retired and Becherer added the chairmanship. He was Deere's seventh president, which is a remarkably short list for a company then 153 years old. The first four had all been Deere or married into the family. He was the first chief executive whose formative career had been spent abroad.
The timing was bad, as these things go. The recovery that followed the mid-decade trough did not last. Between 1990 and 1992 another farm slump cut Deere's revenues by 15 percent, and, in Forbes's later phrasing, "profits just about vanished." The two businesses that might have offset it, construction equipment and consumer goods, were losing money as late as 1991.
Here the record goes quiet in the way corporate records do. There are no memos in the public sources and no reconstructed board meetings. What the record does show is the outcome, and the outcome is the clearest evidence of what was decided. Within seven years those two money-losing lines were producing 30 percent of Deere's operating profit and growing three times as fast as the farm division. Becherer had concluded, it seems, that the company could not keep living and dying on the American farm economy. He set out to build it so that the next farm recession would be survivable, and he was candid that this would make it less purely a farm company.
He did not say it in those words. The words he did use, in 1998, were shorter.
Leaf Blowers, Lawn Tractors, and an HMO
Start with the lawn.
In 1991 Deere bought SABO-Maschinenfabrik, a lawnmower maker in Gummersbach, Germany, east of Cologne. It was not a big deal by the standards of the decade. It was a European consumer business, bought by an American farm company whose chief executive had spent twenty years in Europe running, among other things, consumer products. French trade journalists credited Becherer personally with working on the acquisition. Two years later the company's lawn-and-garden business passed $1 billion in sales for the first time. A unit that would have struck John Deere as a hobby was, by the middle of Becherer's tenure, bigger than most American industrial companies.
Every suburban American with a quarter-acre was a potential customer, and the green-and-yellow paint that had meant seriousness on a four-hundred-acre farm meant the same thing on a cul-de-sac. The riding mower was a tractor for people who did not farm. The leaf blower was hardly a farm tool at all. They were products for those who had left the farm, sold to them in the colors of the life their grandparents had lived.
Construction moved more slowly and less visibly: backhoes, loaders, and graders, the yellow-and-black side of the company. Credit grew under the name of credit operations, which meant financing the machines the company sold. That business would keep growing after Becherer left. By 2017 a trade publication was calling John Deere the fifth-largest agricultural bank in the country, with its finance arm producing about a third of the company's income.
Then there was health care. This is the item that makes outsiders look twice. In 1993 Deere opened a health center for its employees near headquarters. On July 1, 1994, the New York Times ran a headline, "Deere Sees a Future in Health Care." When Harvard Business School later summarized Becherer's tenure, it listed an HMO alongside construction, consumer equipment, and credit as the non-agricultural businesses that together made up nearly half of what Deere did. A tractor company running a health maintenance organization sounds like the sort of conglomerate overreach that business schools teach as a warning. In context it reads more like the reasoning of a man who had managed a large workforce through two farm recessions and had worked out how much the company was already spending on its people's health.
He also cut. In 1999 Sentry Insurance bought John Deere Insurance and leased its old offices, the four-story aluminum-skinned Financial Services Building that Roche-Dinkeloo had designed a few years after Deere West. The company had built that building in 1981 because, in its own words then, it "didn't want to keep doing the same thing in architecture." Eighteen years later it was renting it to a buyer of the business it had housed. Diversification under Becherer ran in both directions.
D
Where the Deere Decade Went
The non-agricultural bets of the Becherer years, by outcome.
| Business | Move | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Lawn & garden | SABO acquisition, 1991; $1B in sales two years later | Scale |
| Construction equipment | From losses in 1991 to part of 30% of operating profit in 1998 | Scale |
| Credit operations | Financing equipment sales | Scale |
| Health care / HMO | Employee health center, 1993; managed care unit | Try |
| Golf & turf | PGA Tour official course equipment supplier, 1997 | Try |
| Insurance | John Deere Insurance sold to Sentry, 1999 | Exit |
In 2020 Deere sold SABO, the German mowing business where much of this had started, to an investment firm called Mutares. By then Becherer had been retired for twenty years. The company he had diversified was diversifying in another direction, toward software, autonomy, and data, and some of what he had acquired no longer fit.
The Iron Underneath
It would be wrong to suggest that Becherer ran a mower company with a tractor division attached. The farm business remained the core. In 1998 the agricultural equipment division alone had $7.4 billion in sales, and the machines it produced in the 1990s are among the most significant the company has built.
The trade press called it Generation III. In 1991 Deere introduced the 5000 Series utility tractors: the 40-horsepower 5200, the 5300, and the 5400. In the fall of 1992 came the 6000 and 7000 Series, with cabs completely redesigned for visibility and comfort, the first serious successor to the Sound-Gard body. That cab had been the industry standard for twenty years, quiet enough that farmers added AM/FM radios because, for the first time, they could hear one over the engine.
The last Sound-Gard tractor came off the line on May 25, 1994. It was a two-wheel-drive 4760. A design that had lasted twenty-two years ended on an ordinary Wednesday in Waterloo, and that year the 8000 Series arrived, among the most advanced row-crop tractors the industry had yet seen. In 1996, at a dealer meeting in New Mexico, Deere showed thirteen new tractors at once, including the 8000T Series on rubber tracks. From then on Deere was the only maker offering row-crop tractors on both wheels and rubber tracks. Caterpillar, the yellow giant up the Illinois River, sued over the track-tensioning design. The 9000 Series replaced the old four-wheel-drive line. In August 1999 Deere brought its dealers to Moline and showed them the 9300T and 9400T, with 425 horsepower on tracks.
Then there was the combine, and it is the one case in the decade where being late is part of the story.
International Harvester introduced rotary combines, the Axial-Flow, in the late 1970s, and other makers followed. Deere kept building conventional straw-walker machines through the 1980s and nearly all of the 1990s. In 1997 the company marked fifty years of self-propelled combines with an anniversary decal. That was a celebration of continuity, and continuity at that point meant the older technology. Only in 1999, the last full year of Becherer's chairmanship, did Deere introduce its Single-Tine Separation system on the 9550, 9650, and 9750, rotary machines that used less horsepower and handled grain better. The trade press called them a complete departure from anything Deere had built.
I don't know how much of that timing was Becherer's decision. Chief executives of companies that size seldom decide threshing geometry. Still, the shape fits the man. He didn't hurry to copy anyone. He waited, and when Deere did move, the result was described as a step forward rather than an imitation.
Pretty Damn Good
In the fall of 1998 a Forbes reporter named Bruce Upbin went to Moline. The news from the farm belt was bad. A big domestic harvest and the Asian financial crisis had pushed grain and livestock prices down. Net U.S. farm income was set to fall nearly 16 percent that year, which Upbin called "recession bordering on depression so far as farmers are concerned." North American retail farm equipment sales could drop 20 percent the next year. Nearly every Wall Street analyst covering Deere, Case, New Holland, and Agco expected earnings to fall at least 10 percent.
Becherer was sixty-three. He met the reporter in the rust-colored building in the ravine and did not sound like a man about to have a bad year.
— Hans Becherer, to Forbes, November 1998Our future looks pretty damn good.
The profanity is the striking part. This was the patrician from St. Anthony Hall, the man a successor would describe as having a "dignified manner," and he chose the language of a man in a seed cap. It may have been a deliberate shift in register, a Harvard man speaking feedlot to show he meant it. It may also have been what twenty years on European dealer floors does to a person's vocabulary. Either way, it served the same purpose as the restored stags. It was a gesture toward the company's roots, made by someone who had moved it a long way from them.
He then said what he actually meant: "The paradigms of the early 1990s have changed. We're different now."
He had the numbers behind him. The previous March, Deere had reported record first-quarter net income of $203.3 million, up 15 percent. "Strong customer response to new products is driving our earnings performance," he said then. And he had set a target that Forbes plainly considered rash: no decline in 1999 earnings per share from 1998's expected $4.16. "Brave fellow," the magazine wrote.
Some of the people carrying out that promise were in rooms Forbes was able to see.
Bernard Hardiek was fifty-seven, an eighteen-year Deere veteran, and ran the $7.4 billion agricultural division. As a boy he had spent long days on his uncle's farm in Effingham, Illinois. Forbes said he knew what it meant to work the soil for a living, and his career had been spent selling machines to people like that uncle. Two months before the reporter arrived, Hardiek had put employees from marketing, engineering, and manufacturing into twenty teams for weeklong sessions and told them to find a cheaper way to build a combine.
They came back with hundreds of small changes. Few saved more than $20 apiece. One was to cast certain frame parts as single pieces instead of welding several together. Since July, Deere had taken $3,000 out of the cost of a $135,000 combine, about $9 million a year at Deere's volumes. Next the teams were going after the $70,000 self-propelled pesticide sprayer. Forbes compared the effort to the cost programs at AlliedSignal and General Electric. It was work done twenty dollars at a time by a man from Effingham, in service of a promise made by a man from Detroit by way of Mannheim.
Becherer had also arranged a contest around it. That fall, Forbes reported, the board was running a succession race among four recently promoted division heads, with Becherer due to retire in two years. "A nice incentive," the magazine noted, "for four guys to notch up to ramming speed on a level track." Hardiek was one of them.
The 1999 results arrived on schedule. For the fiscal year Deere reported net sales and revenues of $11.7 billion and net income of $239 million. Compare that with the single first quarter of 1998, which by itself earned $203.3 million. The farm recession had come, as Forbes had warned.
But the company survived it, which had not been a given in 1990–92. Becherer's "different now" turned out to mean something more modest than he implied: Deere would still have bad years, but they would no longer threaten its existence.
Moline as a Stage
The headquarters closed to the public in 1997.
Visitors had been driving out to Saarinen's ravine for thirty years. By the late 1960s thousands came every year, and by 1970 the total had passed 300,000. Dwight Eisenhower had lunch there. Yanmar sent three hundred carp for the lake. In the 1990s the building was still open for tours seven days a week. In 1997 the company tightened security and stopped visitors at the footbridges. The glass bridge that had carried the public into the main building now marked how far they could go.
That same year, downtown, the John Deere Pavilion opened.
The company had announced it in 1995 as a destination for the people who used to visit headquarters. It was built near the riverfront where Deere's industrial history had actually happened. The old downtown headquarters, occupied since 1870, had been demolished after the 1964 move and replaced with manufacturing. Those factories in turn became obsolete as the company consolidated and modernized. The riverfront that had been the "Farm Implement Capital of the World" was becoming an arena, restaurants, and a hotel. A few steps away stands Beverly Pepper's Spirit of Place, a nineteen-foot, six-ton ductile-iron wedge cast in 1981 at the John Deere Foundry in East Moline, on the site where a plaque says John Deere built his first plow factory in 1848. Near the Pavilion, south of River Drive, is one of the restored copper stags.
The arrangement is telling. Becherer closed the modernist building, with its Japanese gardens and Henry Moore and unlabeled art, and sent the public downtown to the riverbank, the old factory sites, the iron wedge, and the 1890s deer. Corporate work went back to being private. The company's history became something the public could visit.
When he died, Sam Allen named this specifically. Becherer, he said, "was a driving force behind extensive revitalization efforts that took place in downtown Moline that began in the 1990s." He did it in other places too. In 1997 Deere became title sponsor of the PGA Tour stop in the Quad Cities, renamed the John Deere Classic, and the Tour's official golf course equipment supplier. The tournament later moved to the TPC at Deere Run in Silvis, Illinois, where another of the restored stags stands. He served on the board of trustees of Rivermont Collegiate, a private school across the river in Bettendorf, Iowa. In 2001, a year after he retired, the school named a building Becherer Hall.
None of this has much to do with combine margins. A company town's chief executive has a role that the job description doesn't spell out: he is partly the town's patron, whether or not he wants to be. Hewitt took that role on by building something beautiful outside the city. Becherer took it on by bringing the company's public presence back into the city.
The roads changed too. In 1996 the Illinois Department of Transportation bought part of Deere's land to widen John Deere Road, which had been two lanes and backed up at every shift change. The headquarters got a new address. The new four-lane road opened in November 1999, about six months before he left.
Leadership, Leadership, Leadership
In 1998, in the same fall that Forbes visited, Vijay Govindarajan phoned Becherer.
Govindarajan was a strategy professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School, later the Coxe Distinguished Professor of Management, known for the argument that established companies have to deliberately set aside their own success in order to build the next one. He and Becherer were friends. He asked Becherer to picture Deere in 2020.
Becherer said he saw a $50 billion company with global sales and global operations. That was more than four times Deere's revenue at the time, during a farm recession, from a man two years from retirement.
Govindarajan then asked what Deere would need to become that company. By the professor's account, Becherer answered: "leadership, leadership, leadership."
He did not name technology or acquisitions or capital. He named people, and said it three times. The repetition may have been for emphasis or for effect, and it is hard to separate the two. Govindarajan asked other chief executives the same question and got similar answers. He went back to Becherer and asked whether Deere would sign up if Tuck built an executive program for global leaders. Becherer said yes. The result was Global Leadership 2020, a consortium of Deere, Colgate-Palmolive, Corning, Rolls-Royce, and Genworth Financial. Each company sent about a dozen high-potential senior managers through classroom modules in Hanover, New Hampshire, followed by a week in India and a week in China. The program reached its twentieth year in 2019 and still runs under another name.
Consider who was answering the question. In 1962 a young MBA was sent to Sweden and Mannheim and stayed about twenty years. In 1998 the same man, now chairman, decided that what Deere most lacked was more people trained the way he had been, and that this could be done deliberately and on a schedule, instead of by assigning people to the European export office and waiting.
His prediction proved accurate. When Tuck wrote up the program's history in January 2019, it said Deere was "right on track" for $50 billion. In fiscal 2022 the company reported $52.6 billion in revenue, and in 2023 $61.3 billion.
It also became a company he would probably not have recognized in every respect. The machines he sold were steel, hydraulics, and diesel; a farmer with a wrench and a parts catalog could fix them. The machines that produced Deere's 2022 revenue carried software that only Deere could unlock. By the 2020s farmers were suing over the right to repair their own tractors. In April 2026 Deere agreed to pay $99 million to settle a consolidated class action without admitting wrongdoing. In July 2026 it settled with the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to provide repair tools and information to independent shops and owners for ten years. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Deere equipment stolen from Ukrainian dealers was reportedly disabled remotely after it was taken to Russia. The global, diversified, financially sophisticated company Becherer pictured did come about, and it brought with it a kind of control over its products that his generation's machines never had.
None of that was his doing, and fairness requires saying so. He retired in May 2000, and Robert W. Lane succeeded him as chief executive, the winner of the race Forbes had described. Deere's 2020 is not Becherer's fault any more than Hewitt's building caused the 1980s. Executives set a direction and later ones decide what to do with it.
The Committee Room
Retirement did not take him out of corporate life. It moved him from running companies to overseeing them.
He joined the Schering-Plough board in 1989, the year he became Deere's chief executive. He sat on Honeywell's board from 1991 to 2005 and JPMorgan Chase's from 1998 to 2006. In 2004 Junior Achievement inducted him into its U.S. Business Hall of Fame. Harvard Business School included him in its database of the great American business leaders of the twentieth century, with a summary sentence: "Becherer rebuilt Deere & Company, following the financial farm crisis of the 1980s, into a diverse, global competitor."
The boardroom record is less tidy than that sentence.
On April 27, 2004, the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court decided a case captioned Simon v. Becherer. It was a shareholder derivative suit against JPMorgan Chase's directors over the bank's role in the December 2001 collapse of Enron. Becherer's name was first on the caption, alphabetically, because that is how such cases are named. The question on appeal was a procedural one under Delaware law: whether the shareholders had shown with enough particularity that the board could not fairly evaluate a demand to sue itself.
At Schering-Plough his role was more central. He chaired the board's compensation committee, which set chief executive Fred Hassan's pay. In 2008, after the delayed and damaging release of results from the ENHANCE cholesterol trial, shareholders sued Hassan and the directors in federal court in New Jersey, in Cain v. Hassan. The complaint listed Becherer as compensation committee chair and as a member of the audit and governance committees, paid $215,000 a year for his board service and controlling 66,740 shares. A persistent online critic of the company, writing as the case went on, spent a great deal of effort blaming him personally for the compensation committee's decisions. The court ordered Becherer and other committee members to give depositions before Halloween 2011. On October 19, 2011, the parties told the court they had agreed in principle to settle, and the depositions were stayed.
There is no finding of wrongdoing in any of this, and no reason to suggest one. What the record shows is a familiar progression for executives of his generation. A man who spent thirty-eight years building one institution spent the next decade overseeing others, during a period when overseeing them had become legally riskier. The courtesy that had served him at Deere was being examined under oath in Newark.
He lived in Denver at the end. He died in Colorado on October 6, 2016, at eighty-one. He left his wife, Michele, a daughter, Vanessa, and three grandchildren. Deere announced his death the following Tuesday, and Sam Allen, then chairman, issued the statement companies issue.
— Samuel R. Allen, Chairman and CEO, Deere & Company, October 2016Hans was respected for his insightful thinking, broad international experience, and dignified manner. He exemplified integrity, responsibility, and trust and was a remarkable leader who helped shape the John Deere we know today.
The phrase broad international experience sums up the twenty years abroad, and dignified manner covers the patrician bearing Forbes had noted. The statement mentions growth, international expansion, the broader product line, and downtown Moline. It does not mention the stags.
The stags outlasted his public recognition anyway. On September 30, 2011, Deere opened a new sales and marketing center in Olathe, Kansas, and the centerpiece at the entrance was one of the original copper deer. A regional controller named Mike Snyder told the crowd its history: hand-stamped copper, the 1893 World's Fair, Charles Deere's plan for one on every branch and factory, the decay, and then that "recently company CEO Hans Becherer began a program to find and restore as many of them as possible." He was speaking eleven years after Becherer retired and about twenty years after the program began. To the man telling the story, it was still recent.
That says something about how institutions experience time. For a company that marks its age in centuries, two decades counts as recent.
In 2013 a reporter asked the company's collections manager, Nathan Augustine, about the stag downtown, the one by the Pavilion, south of River Drive, near the iron wedge and the vanished factories. He explained the copper, the molds, and the solder. He explained that the antlers vary from one deer to the next, even among the fourteen the company owns, and why.
The antlers are the most fragile part. They get repaired or replaced often.
Part IIThe Playbook
Becherer left few public statements, no memoir, and almost no interviews that weren't about quarterly results. What remains is a set of decisions with visible results and a career whose structure is itself instructive. The principles below are drawn from that record. Each describes how he worked, how the company changed under him, and where the method had costs.
The principles
- 1.Do your apprenticeship at the periphery.
- 2.Diversify against your own cycle, not for growth's sake.
- 3.Buy a beachhead in the market you already understand.
- 4.Restore the symbol while you change the substance.
- 5.Make a promise specific enough to embarrass you.
- 6.Let cost come out twenty dollars at a time.
- 7.Run succession as an announced, open contest.
- 8.Picture the far horizon, then name one bottleneck.
- 9.Prune as well as plant.
- 10.Be late on purpose, then leapfrog.
- 11.Treat the headquarters town as a stakeholder, not a backdrop.
H
A Career in Sequence
Becherer's path from Detroit to the chairman's office and after.
1935
Born April 19 in Detroit, Michigan.
1957
Graduates from Trinity College, Hartford; member of St. Anthony Hall. Air Force service follows.
1962
MBA, Harvard Business School. Joins Deere & Company; postings follow in Sweden and at the export operation in Mannheim.
1983
Senior vice president, overseas farm and consumer products.
1986
Executive vice president, worldwide farm equipment and consumer products.
1987
Returns as president and chief operating officer.
1989
Chief executive officer. Joins the Schering-Plough board.
1990
Chairman in May, on Robert Hanson's retirement.
1991
Deere acquires SABO lawnmowers of Gummersbach, Germany.
1993
Lawn-and-garden sales top $1 billion for the first time.
1997
John Deere Pavilion opens in downtown Moline; Deere becomes title sponsor of the John Deere Classic.
1998
About 25% of sales from outside the U.S.; nearly 50% of the product mix non-agricultural.
2000
Retires in May; succeeded by Robert W. Lane.
2004
Inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame.
2016
Dies October 6 in Colorado, age 81.
Principle 1
Do your apprenticeship at the periphery
Becherer spent about two decades of a thirty-eight-year career away from headquarters, running Swedish sales and then the export operation at Mannheim, in a German factory Deere had bought only a few years earlier. That was not the standard route to the top of a Midwestern manufacturer, where advancement usually ran through the home plants and the American dealer network. From the outside, though, he could see the company as a foreign customer saw it: one brand among several, with no claim on anyone's loyalty.
That view showed up later in his decisions. He bought a German mowing company, pushed foreign sales to a quarter of revenue, and when asked what Deere's future needed, sponsored a program that sends executives to India and China for weeks at a time. He was building, on purpose, the experience he had stumbled into.
The periphery offers something headquarters can't: real authority over a small business, combined with constant reminders that the parent's assumptions don't travel. A manager running exports out of Mannheim learns quickly which of Moline's habits are principles and which are just local custom.
Tactic: Before promoting your most promising executive toward the center, give them several years running something far from it, in a market where your brand counts for little.
Principle 2
Diversify against your own cycle, not for growth's sake
There are two kinds of diversification, and the difference matters. One seeks growth wherever it can be found. The other seeks businesses that do badly at different times than your core does. Becherer's was the second kind. His reference point was 1990–92, when a farm downturn cut Deere's revenues 15 percent and nearly wiped out profit. Seven years later, construction and consumer products produced 30 percent of operating profit and were growing three times as fast as farm equipment.
What mattered was not the size of those businesses but what drove their demand. Homeowners buy riding mowers based on housing and suburban income, not grain prices. Builders buy backhoes on construction cycles, not crop cycles. The result was a company whose income came from several economies at once.
The test came in 1998–99, a severe farm recession, and the results were mixed. Net income in fiscal 1999 was $239 million, less than Deere had earned in the first quarter of 1998 alone. But the company stayed solidly profitable through a downturn that had nearly erased its earnings at the start of the decade. Diversifying against the cycle does not prevent bad years. It keeps them from becoming fatal.
Tactic: Find your core business's two worst years, identify what caused them, and build your next line of business around customers whose demand comes from somewhere else.
Principle 3
Buy a beachhead in the market you already understand
The SABO purchase in 1991 was small, European, and in consumer goods, which was exactly the territory Becherer had managed for years before he returned to Moline. Two years later the lawn-and-garden business passed $1 billion for the first time. He did not attempt a huge acquisition in an industry he hadn't worked in. He bought a foothold in one he knew from the inside.
This is a sound way to make acquisitions. A large deal outside your experience depends heavily on luck and on the seller's honesty. A small one inside your experience mostly tests how well you execute, and you can judge that yourself.
There is a second half to the story. In 2020 Deere sold SABO to Mutares. A foothold is meant to serve a purpose at a particular stage, and a later leadership team is entitled to decide that stage is over.
Tactic: For your next acquisition, choose a market where you personally have run operations, and make the deal small enough that failure would be embarrassing but not damaging.
Principle 4
Restore the symbol while you change the substance
In the early 1990s, as Deere was moving toward a business that would be half non-agricultural, Becherer started a program to find and restore the copper stags that Charles Deere had put on factory roofs in the 1890s. Fourteen survive. In 1997 he opened a pavilion celebrating the company's history in downtown Moline, close to where the first plow factory stood, and in the same year he closed the modernist headquarters to the public.
People absorb large changes more easily when the familiar symbols are visibly cared for. The employee in Waterloo, the dealer in Nebraska, and the retiree in Moline could see the company moving into leaf blowers and health care, and they could also see the deer being repaired and the old riverfront brought back. Taking care of the symbols bought him room to change what the company did.
This is not a cynical observation. A leader can value the symbols and also use them. The record suggests Becherer did both.
Tactic: Before announcing a major change in strategy, identify your organization's most neglected symbol of origin and restore it publicly and carefully.
Principle 5
Make a promise specific enough to embarrass you
In 1998, with farm income down nearly 16 percent and analysts forecasting double-digit earnings declines across the industry, Becherer said publicly that Deere's earnings per share would not fall below 1998's expected $4.16. Forbes called him a "brave fellow," and the tone was skeptical. He also told the magazine the outlook was "pretty damn good."
A specific, public number pulls an organization into line. It also gave Bernard Hardiek's cost teams a reason to sit through weeklong sessions in late summer. "Improve margins" sets no deadline. "No decline from $4.16" does.
The target was probably missed; the 1999 results were well below the year before. But a missed target can still do its job if it drives the work that keeps the company healthy through the downturn. The point of a specific promise is the effort it produces, not only whether it is met.
Tactic: Pick one metric, state publicly the floor you will defend, and let the risk of missing it focus the organization.
C
Conventional Wisdom vs. the Becherer Approach
How his choices departed from the standard heavy-industry playbook of the era.
| Conventional wisdom | What Becherer did |
|---|---|
| Rise through the home plants and domestic dealer network. | Spent roughly twenty years in Sweden and Germany. |
| Stick to the core in a crisis. | Used the crisis to build businesses that decline at different times than the core. |
| Modernize by dropping heritage. | Restored the 1890s copper stags while modernizing the business. |
| Give guidance in cautious, hedged language. | Set a specific earnings-per-share floor in public during a farm recession. |
| Run succession quietly and present the result. | Let four division heads compete openly for two years. |
| Match competitors' technology quickly. | Stayed with walker combines until the STS rotary system was ready in 1999. |
Principle 6
Let cost come out twenty dollars at a time
Under Becherer's earnings promise, Hardiek's agricultural division put engineers, marketers, and manufacturing staff into twenty cross-functional teams with one assignment: find a cheaper way to build a combine. They found hundreds of changes, few worth more than $20 each, such as casting frame parts in one piece instead of welding several together. Together they took $3,000 off a $135,000 machine, around $9 million a year, and the teams then moved on to the $70,000 sprayer.
The approach is unglamorous on purpose. Big cost cuts usually mean layoffs or plant closures, which hurt morale and are hard to reverse. Hundreds of small engineering changes do not hurt anyone, they stay in place, and each one teaches the people who found it to look for the next.
Forbes compared it to programs at AlliedSignal and GE. The more useful lesson is the arithmetic: $20 multiplied by enough parts and enough units adds up to real money.
Tactic: Assemble a cross-functional team for one week with a single product and a directive to find savings under $50 per unit, and see how many they find.
Principle 7
Run succession as an announced, open contest
In 1998, two years before he planned to retire, Deere's board under Becherer was openly weighing four recently promoted division heads. Forbes called it "a nice incentive for four guys to notch up to ramming speed on a level track." Robert W. Lane got the job in 2000.
An open succession contest during a recession is risky. It can split the executive group, encourage people to optimize for the short term, and leave the losers resentful. It also does two useful things. Each candidate's division gets a motivated leader in a hard year, and the board gets to watch the candidates perform under real pressure instead of in interviews.
Becherer also set his own departure date in advance and kept it. A chief executive who announces when he is leaving takes himself out of the competition, which gives the contest some credibility.
Tactic: If you are within three years of stepping down, name the date, name the field, and give each candidate a business to run through a difficult stretch.
Principle 8
Picture the far horizon, then name one bottleneck
Asked in 1998 to picture Deere in 2020, Becherer described a $50 billion global company, more than four times its size then. Asked what it would take, he said "leadership, leadership, leadership," and then committed Deere to a new executive program at Tuck with Colgate-Palmolive, Corning, Rolls-Royce, and Genworth.
The useful thing here is the pairing. A distant, ambitious picture tends to produce strategy documents. A single named constraint produces something people can act on. By saying the company's limit was leaders rather than capital or technology, Becherer made the vision into a program with a budget, a curriculum, and a group of attendees who would still be working in 2020.
Deere passed $50 billion in revenue in fiscal 2022. Whether the program caused that cannot be proved, but the prediction held.
Tactic: Write down where your organization should be in twenty years, then name the one constraint that would most prevent it, and fund a specific fix this quarter.
Principle 9
Prune as well as plant
Becherer's diversification is remembered for what he added: lawn equipment, construction, credit, health care, golf. But in 1999 Deere also sold John Deere Insurance to Sentry, which then leased the building the business had occupied. An executive who only adds ends up with a conglomerate that serves no clear purpose.
Pruning is harder than planting because each business has people and history behind it, and because selling looks like admitting a mistake. Selling a business that no longer fits is simply part of managing a portfolio.
His successors kept doing it: Timberjack was bought in 2000 and gone by 2006, and SABO was sold in 2020. The organization learned that a business could be acquired for a particular period and released when that period ended.
Tactic: For every business you add, set an explicit test for keeping it, and review it with someone who had no part in the acquisition.
Principle 10
Be late on purpose, then leapfrog
International Harvester brought out rotary combines in the late 1970s, and other makers followed. Deere stayed with conventional walker combines through the 1980s and nearly all of the 1990s, and even celebrated its long combine history with an anniversary decal in 1997. Then in 1999 it launched the Single-Tine Separation system, a rotary design that used less horsepower and handled crop better, which the trade press saw as a real advance.
The public record doesn't show how much of that timing was Becherer's own call. The pattern is still worth recognizing. A market leader with a large base of satisfied customers can afford to watch rivals work through a new technology's early problems and then enter with something better instead of a copy. The risk is waiting too long. The reward is showing up with the improved version.
The same thinking runs through the rest of his decade. The Sound-Gard cab lasted twenty-two years before its successor was ready, and the 8000 Series arrived only when it could set a new standard.
Tactic: When a competitor launches a new technology, judge whether your installed base gives you time, and if it does, use that time to build the second version instead of the first.
Principle 11
Treat the headquarters town as a stakeholder, not a backdrop
In 1997 Becherer stopped visitors at the headquarters footbridges and opened the John Deere Pavilion downtown, near the old factory sites. That year Deere also became title sponsor of the PGA Tour event in the Quad Cities. He served on the board of a local school, which later named a building for him. His successor's tribute singled out the downtown Moline revitalization.
For a company that once employed one in six people in its hometown, the town's condition affects the company directly. It determines whether engineers will move there, whether spouses will stay, and whether the region can absorb a downturn.
There is a later caution here as well. In the 2020s Deere announced Midwest layoffs and considered moving some production to Mexico. A company that wins local goodwill in good times will find that goodwill tested in bad ones.
Tactic: List three civic investments in your headquarters region that would still matter if your company left in ten years, and fund one of them.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Hans Becherer, to Forbes, November 1998The paradigms of the early 1990s have changed. We're different now.
— Hans Becherer, on Deere's record first-quarter results, March 1998Strong customer response to new products is driving our earnings performance.
— Hans Becherer, asked by Vijay Govindarajan in 1998 what Deere would need to become a $50 billion company by 2020Leadership, leadership, leadership.
— Samuel R. Allen, Chairman and CEO, Deere & Company, October 2016Hans Becherer led Deere & Company during a time of significant growth and financial success. He is credited with expanding Deere's international operations, broadening the product portfolio, and strengthening Deere's global leadership in agriculture.
Maxims
- Learn the company from outside. Years at the edge of the business show you which headquarters habits are principles and which are local custom.
- Diversify against your own downturns. The most valuable new business is one that does well when your core does badly.
- Buy what you've already run. Acquisitions in markets you have operated in personally depend on your execution, not on luck.
- Maintain the old symbols. Visibly caring for the company's history makes people more willing to accept changes to its business.
- Commit to a number. A specific public target gives the organization a reason to do hard work in a hard year.
- Accumulate small savings. Hundreds of twenty-dollar engineering changes add up to millions and leave no damage behind.
- Make succession an open contest. Candidates show more under real pressure than in interviews.
- Pair a long-range goal with one constraint. A distant vision becomes actionable once you name what most limits it.
- Sell what no longer fits. Divesting a business that has served its purpose is ordinary portfolio management.
- Expect repairs. Fragile pieces of an institution will break and need fixing; plan for it.
