Down through the years Unilever's press clippings have been depressingly consistent. In 1979 BusinessWeek characterized the Anglo-Dutch company as "a rather fuddy-duddy relic of the age of empire." In 1983 The New York Times called it "big, plodding, safe." In 1984 the Financial Times said Unilever was "so big that it ploughs on remorselessly like a super-tanker, scarcely able to change course." And Forbes in 1985 labeled Unilever "a sleeping giant."

Interspersed among these comments is the Rip Van Winkle theme, hence these headlines: "Unilever Cleans Up Its Act" (Forbes); "After Years of Decline, Lever Brothers Has Plans for a Comeback" (The Wall Street Journal); "Why Unilever Is Taking the Gloves Off" (Financial Times); "Unilever Alters Its Game Plan" (The New York Times); "Unilever Fights Back in the U.S." (Fortune); "Unilever Lets in a Shaft of Sunlight" (Financial Times).

Much of this feeling was inspired by the dismal performance of Unilever's American subsidiary, Lever Brothers, cast in the thankless role of competing against mighty Procter & Gamble. Before World War II, with its Lux, Rinso, Lifebuoy, and Spry brands, Lever held its own. However, after the war, when P&G ushered in the detergent age with Tide, Lever was overwhelmed-and the dividends remitted home from New York slowed to a trickle, at times even stopped. But it's more than the American experience that critics have reacted to. These commentators hall for the most part from the business world where Unilever is seen as a gargantuan corporation with no great facility for squeezing profits out of revenues. In 1984, for example, while Unilever was earning $583 million on sales of $18.7 billion, Procter & Gamble was earning $880 million on sales of $12.9 billion, and Nestle was earning $632 million on sales of $13.2 billion. Unilever never actually loses money, but the suspicion is that it may not have the bottom-line zeal that other companies have.

This is not to say that Unilever is an eleemosynary institution. Marxist critics have not been shy about depicting it as a ruthless exploiter of resources and people on a global scale. So Unilever is unloved on both the right, where it's perceived as a puny profit producer, and the left, where it's perceived as a stalwart arm of imperialism.

On one point everyone can agree: Unilever is big. It's the largest consumer products company in the world. It's the world's third-largest advertiser. And it's the most multinational of all the multinational corporations. More than five hundred companies belong to the Unilever Group, and they operate in seventy-eight countries, manufacturing in most of them. A unadmiring writer once lamented that "something approaching two thirds of mankind buy from or sell to Unilever, and most people use its products every single day of their lives." The company's own literature says rather matter-of-factly: "Unilever does business in or with nearly every country in the world." No other company can claim that ubiquity. The British and Dutch empires might be down, but the Unilever Empire remains in place.

It's an empire built on fats and oils, and its binational roots go back to the latter half of the nineteenth century when the Industrial Age spawned working-class households with money to spend. Entrepreneurs began to package products under brand names and promote them to millions of the new consumers. It was the dawn of modern advertising and merchandising.

William Hesketh Lever was a child of that age. Born in 1851 in the industrial North of England, he was introduced early on to selling through the wholesale grocery business his father operated in Bolton, a city fifteen miles northwest of Manchester. William and his brother, James D'Arcy Lever, worked in the family business before starting their own company, Lever Brothers, in 1885, to sell soap packaged under the Sunlight name.

It's such a mundane product today that it's hard to realize what an innovation it was then to sell a bar of soap that was wrapped in imitation parchment and packed in a carton bearing an identifying name. Previously, most soap was sold in long, anonymous bars that the grocer sliced up to the customer's order. Lever's Sunlight soap was also softer than the soaps then in common use (which meant it dissolved more quickly), and it lathered more generously. At first Lever sold soap made by others, but in 1885 he began making his own, using this formula: A mixture of copra or palm kernel oil, cottonseed oil, resin, and tallow.

He embarked immediately on a high-powered advertising campaign for Sunlight, establishing it as one of the early national brands in Britain. "Why does a woman look older sooner than a man?" was one of his first thrusts on behalf of Sunlight. (Lever bought this idea from an American soap maker, Frank Siddall for $2,500.) Lever was not the first to discover the efficacy of mass advertising. He followed in the footsteps of a rival, Thomas J. Barratt, who took over the Pears soap company in 1875. Pears may have been the most heavily advertised brand of the nineteenth century, responsible for a host of memorable slogans ("How do you spell soap? Why P-E-A-R-S, of course." "Good morning! Have you used Pears Soap?") Barratt once said, "Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell it."

William Hesketh Lever was a child of his age in other ways as well. He enthusiastically supported the Liberal party, which was the agent of the new industrialists and business class, aligned against the Tories and the old landed aristocracy. The Liberals championed democratic electoral reforms, free trade, and religious liberty. They took many of their ideas from the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, whose doctrine that the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people represents the foundation of morality seemed to be an appropriate philosophy for the capitalist revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century.

Thus it was that Lever not only began to advertise and sell soap to the masses but tried, inevitably, to imbue his venture with social significance. In 1887 he began building a new plant in Lancashire on the Wirral peninsula that juts out between the Mersey and Dee rivers into the Irish Sea in northwest England. Completed in 1889 it became the biggest soapworks in the world. It also became the center of a new town, Port Sunlight, where workers lived in company houses bordered by gardens and designed in a variety of styles-some, for example, were reproductions of Ann Hathaway's cottage. It was paternalism fired by the Liberal imagination of William Lever.

Port Sunlight had its own theater, concert hall, gymnasium, and outdoor swimming pool. In return for these amenities, the residents were expected to toe a puritanical line laid down by Lever, who felt that he knew what was best for his workers. He introduced a "prosperity-sharing" scheme in which he, rather than the employee, decided how the money was to be spent. He told his employees that if they were given a year-end bonus, "it will not do you much good if you send it down your throat in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets or fat geese for Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave this money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything which makes life pleasant-nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation."

William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal party in the last half of the nineteenth century, serving four times as prime minister, came to Port Sunlight in 1891 to open a new dining hall and recreation room. He told the assembled soap millers, "In this hall I have found a living proof that cash payment is not the only nexus between man and man."

Lever was an indefatigable proselytizer and accumulator. Although anti-imperialism was one of the planks of the Liberal party, Lever quickly expanded his soap business beyond the United Kingdom, moving into Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the United States before the turn of the century. He also moved to assure his own supply of raw materials (vegetable oils) by going into the plantation business. In 1905 he bought 5 1,000 acres in the Solomon Islands and planted them with coconut seed. By 1913 Lever's holdings there extended over 300,000 acres. He did the same in the Belgian Congo and West Africa, through concessions and acquisition of trading companies that he thought would bring him a steady supply of palm oil to feed his soap plants. World War I helped. A British blockade cut off German mills from their vegetable oil resources in West Africa-and many of these supplies were diverted to Lever Brothers, helping the company move into the production of margarine.

One by-product of soap making is glycerine, and Lever delivered this chemical to British arms makers to help them make explosives. In 1917, in recognition of his contribution to the war effort, William Hesketh Lever became a life peer: Lord Leverhulme.

In 1921 Lever Brothers moved its headquarters from Port Sunlight to London, occupying an ornate, colonnaded building on the Thames Embankment near Blackfriars Station. The curved, colonnaded stone Unilever House that today stands on the same site went up in 1931, an art deco version of the earlier structure, which originally housed De Keyser's Royal Hotel, a German enterprise. In a six-year rehabilitation that ended in 1983, Unilever House was renovated and expanded by the addition of an eight-story wing-the new wing was low enough so that it did not violate the long-standing edict of London planning authorities that no building can go up to a height that would block the view of Saint Paul's cathedral from Waterloo Bridge.

An ebullient salesman who backed his products with more advertising than the world had ever seen, William Hesketh Lever also proved to be adept at acquiring other companies, for which he developed a ravenous appetite. In 1906 he bought the Vinolia toilet soap company; in 1910 Hudson's, Britain's leading maker of soap powder. He scooped up three other British soap companies between 1910 and 1915, bought out his largest competitors in Australia and South Africa, and eventually had the satisfaction of absorbing his old rival, Pears transparent soap.

In his life outside of Lever Brothers, Lord Leverhulme was also active as a builder and acquirer. In 1918 and 1919 he bought the islands of Lewis and Harris in the Hebrides off Scotland, planning, according to one British muckraker, "to create for himself a feudal estate." Local opposition defeated these plans but not before Lord Leverhulme had put together a little private empire that included trawling vessels, canneries, and a nationwide chain of fish-and-chip shops, Mac Fisheries. To supply these outlets with meat products, Sir Leverhulme also thoughtfully bought the sausage pie-firm of Thomas Walls, which later turned to ice cream making to relieve the summer doldrums. It was an interesting assemblage, but in 1922 he abandoned his separate empire and sold all these businesses to-surprise-Lever Brothers. Lord Leverhulme died in 1925, four years before a titanic merger that was to catapult his company into even greater prominence on the world industrial scene. (He left a substantial part of his estate to the Leverhulme Trust, whose 6 percent holding today makes it the largest single stockholder.)

Margarine was invented in 1869 in, of all places, France. It came about as a result of a contest sponsored by Napoleon III for a tasty butter substitute. Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, a French chemist, came up with the winning spread, combining beef fat with milk. Two major butter marketers in the Netherlands-Jurgens and Van den Berghs-were immediately interested in this imitation. Both companies were based in Oss, an industrial town in south central Holland, in the heart of a dairy region. In the late 1860s they had already emerged as major butter traders, not just in their home country but throughout Europe. Jurgens was, in fact, established as the largest seller of butter in Europe. The Dutch butter merchants, whose two main markets were Germany and Britain, saw immediately the potential of margarine, which then, as now, sold for less than butter. The target consumers were working-class people who couldn't afford butter.

Initially, the margarine made by the Dutch companies used animal fats-and there was, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, an ample supply from the American meatpacking companies in Chicago. But in the early part of the twentieth century the U.S. meatpackers formed a cartel (that was later broken up) and jacked up the price of their waste fats. The margarine makers then turned to a new raw material, vegetable oils-an alternative discovered by Wilhelm Normann, a German scientist who found in 1902 how to "harden" these oils by hydrogenation. Margarine began to be made from sesame, coconut, peanut, and palm oils. And it became important then to have efficient mills to crush the seeds and extract the oil. Nineteen hundred was the takeoff point for margarine; consumption quadrupled in the next forty years.

It's no accident that Armour, a meat company, made Dial soap, or that Procter & Gamble, a soap company, made Crisco shortening. Or that any margarine company would make a soap or any soap company a margarine. These products-soaps, shortenings, margarines-share a common raw material base: oils and fats. It wasn't long then before the two Dutch fat producers, Jurgens and Van den Berghs, began to make soaps. And Unilever began to make margarine during World War I at the behest of the British government, which was worried about being so dependent on foreign sources for edible fats. (A modern nation can't do without its fats.)

A strong characteristic of industry in the early part of the twentieth century was a yearning for monopoly. It was a desire that transcended national borders. In the United States trusts were formed to dominate the oil, tobacco, and meatpacking industries. In Germany all the major chemical companies were amalgamated in 1925 into the 1. G. Farben cartel. In Britain four large chemical producers joined in 1927 to form Imperial Chemical Industries. And an audacious Swede, Ivar Kreuger, was busy buying up all the match companies of the world.

The Dutch margarine companies had been trying from as early as 1908 to eliminate competition among themselves through various profitpooling arrangements, which didn't work too well because someone could always be counted on to cheat. They solved this dilemma in 1927 by merging their forces into the Margarine Union. The charter members were Jurgens and Van den Berghs. Together they had a lock on the European margarine business. They then had discussions with Lever Brothers about the possibility of setting up a soap trust, in which all the soap operations of the three companies would be combined, and a margarine trust, in which all their margarine activities would be merged. They couldn't get these cartels organized, and so they decided instead to merge all their operations into one big company.

The Margarine Union and Lever Brothers combined to form Uni-lever, which began functioning as an Anglo-Dutch enterprise on January 1, 1930. The corporate structure has never changed. To avoid double taxation, two companies were established-Unilever PLC, which is incorporated in Britain, and Unilever NV, incorporated in the Netherlands. While some subsidiaries are owned by the Dutch company and others by the British company, Unilever in practice operates as one group. It has twin headquarters-one in London, one in Rotterdam. The two parent companies have identical boards of directors. They pay dividends to shareholders that are equal in value. They report results on a consolidated basis as if they were one company. It's a unique international partnership that has survived more than'fifty years.

A company midwifed by merger rarely gives up that heritage. Unilever has grown by swallowing other companies-dozens of them-all over the globe, including Lipton's (United States and Canada), Brooke Bond (Britain), Harriet Hubbard Ayer (France), Pepsodent (United States), Batchelors (Britain), Vita (Netherlands), Rondi (South Africa), Perlina (Peru), Gessy (Brazil), McNiven (Australia), National Starch & Chemical (United States). It's a practice that continues in full force today. In the three-year period from 1984 through 1986, Unilever sold more than fifty units with total sales of $3 billion a year while buying about fifty companies with combined sales of $6 billion. The biggest catch was Chesebrough-Pond's, an American company whose roots also go back to the last century. Unilever paid $3.1 billion for Chesebrough.

Unilever is not so much a collection of companies as an armada of brand names, more than a thousand of them. You are not likely to encounter the Unilever name unless you're an investor (Unilever shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange), But who in the United States has not heard of All, Surf, Wisk, Breeze, Lux, Dove, Close-Up, WishBone, and Imperial? And who in Britain has not heard of Stork and Blue Band margarines, Birds Eye frozen foods, Persil and Drive detergents, Vim cleanser, Wall's sausage and ice cream, Sunsilk shampoo, Oxo cubes, John West canned fruits and vegetables, Fray Bentos canned meats, and Haywards pickles? Who in Italy has not heard of Timotei shampoo, and who in Europe has not heard of the deodorants Rexona and Impulse? Who in West Africa has not heard of the detergent Omo? The Chesebrough-Pond's acquisition swung into the Unilever column the familiar brand names Vaseline, Pond's, Q-tips, Ragu, and Prince Matchabelli.

To make sure these brands do not go unnoticed, Unilever spent more than $1 billion on advertising in 1985: $450 million in Europe, $400 million in the United States, and $250 million in the rest of the world. From the earliest days of this enterprise, whether it's traced to Britain or Holland, advertising was a keystone of the business. It was such an important element in company affairs that Unilever developed its own house agency, Lintas (Lever International Advertising Service), which for many years ranked as one of the world's largest advertising agencies. (No longer part of Unilever, it survives today as a founding partner of SSC&B: Lintas Worldwide, the fifteenth-largest advertising agency in the world.)

In a notable defense of this means of communication, Lord Heyworth, Unilever's chairman from 1941 to 1960, devoted his 1958 address to shareholders to an explanation of why the company, then the largest advertiser in the world, spent $234 million in 1957 to promote its hundreds of brands in more than one hundred countries. Lord Heyworth said that after having spent large sums of money, time, and thought in coming up with products "we believe the consumer wants, it would be foolish indeed to stop short at that point and not take steps to tell them what we have to sell and try to persuade them to buy." As to the criticism that advertising tempts people to spend money on goods they cannot afford, thereby reducing them to a state of financial misery while tantalizing them with things they cannot buy, Lord Heyworth had this rejoinder: "This particular attack, I may say, leaves Unilever's withers reasonably unwrung, for we have yet to hear of a housewife driven to bankruptcy through lavish expenditure on soap, margarine, sausages, or toothpaste. But all such criticism leads, in the end, to protect the weak-willing and weak-witted minority against the need to leave the robust and shrewd majority with the right to pick and choose for themselves. Let us by all means continue to improve the ethics of advertising, which indeed in many countries is already subject to codes of conduct far stricter than some critics realize. But if this process of improvement results in the advertiser being deprived of the basic right to persuade the consumer to exercise his or her choice in his favor, the consumer, too, will find that she has lost something. She will have lost her freedom of choice."

That's the philosophical backdrop for the long-running Lever campaign showing people eating Imperial margarine suddenly being crowned.

This enduring faith in advertising and the sanctity of brand names is a trait Unilever shares with Procter & Gamble, General Foods, Nestle, and other package goods producers. But it would be a mistake to identify Unilever as nothing more than the Anglo-Dutch counterpart of these companies. Unilever has idiosyncrasies rooted strongly in its history. It has always been more holistic in the sense of being involved in the entire process that results in a consumer product, beginning with the raw materials, wherever they might be located. Even today, when colonial powers have been routed all over the world, Unilever farms ninety-two thousand hectares of plantations in eight countries: Cameroon, Colombia, Ghana, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Solomon Islands, Thailand, and Zaire. Some thirtyfour thousand people are employed on these plantations, producing palm oil, rubber, coconut, cocoa, and tea. And in 1984 Unilever added another thirty thousand people to this plantation work force by paying $480 million to acquire Brooke Bond, which has tea estates in Africa and India.

In Unilever one activity has frequently led to another-and the company always seemed ready to let this happen. The oil seeds crushed for use in margarine and soap yielded a by-product known as "cattle cake," which prompted a move into animal feeds. Processing the oil for use in margarine and soap yields other by-products, glycerine and fatty acids, which led Unilever into chemicals, a $2-billion business in 1986. Those millions of consumer products need to be packaged, which resulted in Unilever operating twenty-four packaging plants in six European countries. Consumer goods must also be transported, which turned Unilever into one of the largest truckers in Britain-and for fifty years, before it was sold in 1985, the Unilever-owned Palm Line was one of the biggest shipping companies out of West Africa. Unilever farms for salmon in Scotland, has prawn farms in several Asian countries, and is the major owner of a vertically integrated fishing business out of West Germany that includes catching the fish in deep-sea trawlers, processing the catch, and then selling the fish in company-owned shops and restaurants that carry the Nordsee name.

The Unilever companies originally moved into overseas territories for two reasons: They wanted to sell their products everywhere and they wanted to secure raw material bases. However, once a unit was established somewhere, it tended to be interested in all manner of businesses. Having a narrow focus is not a charge that can be brought against Unilever. For example, after planting coconut seeds in the Solomon Islands in 1905, Lever had to wait until the trees reached maturity. While waiting, the Lever outpost there began trading in pearl and tortoiseshell. The prime exhibit in Unilever's predilection for spreading itself over many areas is the fabled United Africa Company (UAC), which William Hesketh Lever began putting together in 1910 when he bought W. B. Maclver, a Liverpool trading company operating in Nigeria. In the next nineteen years trading company after trading company in West Africa fell into the hands of Lever Brothers, culminating on March 3, 1929, nine months before the merger with the Margarine Union, in the amalgamation of the Lever-controlled Niger Company with the African and Eastern Trade Corporation. The formation of the new Lever subsidiary, United Africa Company, was announced, fittingly enough, from the Savoy Hotel in London. Subsumed in UAC were activities of more than a dozen trading companies, most of them of British origin, one of whose histories went back three hundred years to its days as a slave trader. The trading company is a form of commercial activity unfamiliar to most Americans. It's basically a merchant business that can do virtually anything, act as a wholesaler, retailer, manufacturer, exporter, importer, banker-you name it-and UAC did it. The company's basic role was to export the crops of African farmers and import manufactured goods from Europe.

When UAC was formed, it controlled 60 percent of the exports of palm oil, 45 percent of palm kernel, 60 percent of peanuts, and 50 percent of cocoa from the four British colonies of West Africa-Nigeria, Gold Coast (now Ghana), Gambia, and Sierra Leone. In addition, UAC had extensive operations in other African countries, including the Belgian Congo, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. In all, it had one thousand locations on the African continent.

For the next twenty years, from 1929 to 1949, Unilever's UAC was unquestionably the largest and most important company operating on the African continent. Nor was its contribution to Unilever insignificant. In the years immediately following World War II, UAC accounted for one fifth of Unilever's turnover and, if the contribution of the plantations was added, between one third to one half of the profits. Independence movements swept Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal out of Africa in the post-World War II years but not Unilever. To be sure, its role changed. It no longer controls the marketing of West African crops. And it has been forced to sell manufacturing units to governments, including a majority interest in its biggest subsidiary, United Africa Company of Nigeria.

In 1973, to adjust to these changing political conditions, Unilever changed the name of United Africa Company to UAC International and changed its charter as well. Based now in London, UAC consists of a group of companies whose spheres of influence extend to more than thirty countries and whose operations span a wide range of activities outside the traditional ones of Unilever (soap, detergents, margarine, foods), UAC companies brew beer in Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, and Sierra Leone (in conjunction with Guinness and Heineken), distribute Caterpillar tractors in Britain, harvest timber in Nigeria and the Solomon Islands, distribute wine in France, weave textiles in the Ivory Coast, assemble passenger cars in Nigeria, wholesale electrical equipment in France, and operate department stores in Ghana. The Lagos-based United Africa Company, now 40 percent-owned by Unilever, coner, coto be Nigeria's largest company (outside of tide of tide of the state-owned od the 60 percent-owned United Africa Company of Ghana is the largest company in that nation. Unilever is more than Lux soap.

If it had its druthers, Unilever would own 100 percent of its overseas subsidiaries. But as a seasoned sailor in international waters, it knows how and when to tack to the winds of change. The result is a crazy-quilt pattern that shows Unilever owning 100 percent of all its subsidiaries in the United States, which include Lawry's and Shedd's; 51 of percent of Hindustan Lever, the third-largest company in India; 40 percent of Lever Brothers Nigeria; 50 percent of Margarinefabrikken in Denmark; 66 percent of Lever Brothers Pakistan; and 95 percent of Nippon Lever in Japan. Unilever has found its companies nationalized in more than a dozen countries. "This nationalization," the company once noted, "may be with full compensation, as in Iraq; with deferred compensation, as in Burma; or with partial, differed compensation, as in Egypt; or anything in between."

Unilever's fine art of survival in a politically unstable world is nowhere better demonstrated than in Indonesia, the world's fifth-largest country (by population), Covering some 13,700 islands (Sumatra, Java, and Ball are three of the largest) which stretch over 3,200 miles from east to west in the South Pacific, Indonesia was ruled as a Dutch colony for more than three hundred years before it was occupied by the Japanese in 1942. Lever, after exporting to Indonesia for more than twenty-five years, had put up a soap plant in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1935, when Indonesia's population was 60 million. Margarine production began in 1936, and during the Japanese occupation the Unilever plant was run by Mitsubishi.

After the war Unilever people returned and began to rebuild the business even in the midst of a struggle for independence that resulted in the final ejection of the Dutch troops in 1949. A new Indonesian government was established under the presidency of Sukarno, a radical nationalist leader who had been jailed many times by the Dutch before the war and who had cooperated with the Japanese invaders, Although Unilever was half-Dutch and molt of its managers in Indonesia were Dutch, the company did not side with the hard-line colonialists in The Hague, and, in fact, welcomed Indonesian independence. However, in the political turmoil that followed independence, Unilever was fortunate to have dual nationality.

In 1958 the Indonesian government decided to nationalize all the Dutch companies. Unilever escaped unscathed. It transferred all the shares of the Indonesian company from Rotterdam (Unilever NV) to London (Unilever PLC) and evacuated all the Dutch employees, replacing them with Britons, Germans, and Scandinavians. ("Look, folks, we're British.") However, five years later, Sukarno got into a screaming match with the British over the creation of the new state of Malaysia out of what was once Malaya, Singapore, and two parts of the large island of BorneoSarawak and North Borneo (now Sabah). Most of Borneo belongs to Indonesia, hence the violent objections of Sukarno, who carried on this confrontation for three years, including the mounting of guerrilla raids into the Malaysian territory of Borneo.

Unilever, responding to the anti-British feeling, now reversed its field. In 1964 all the shares of the Indonesian company were transferred back to Rotterdam, and all the British managers were replaced by Dutch nationals. ("Look, folks, we're Dutch.") Because of the violent political strife that erupted in the country the tactic didn't work this time. In 1965 a Communist coup resulted in the assassination of eight top military officers, followed quickly by a counter-coup led by General Suharto. From 1965 to 1967, when Suharto formed a new government, Unilever lost effective control of its Indonesian operations. The subsidiary was never formally nationalized, but a combination of leftist union leaders, military leaders, and government bureaucrats called all the shots, and the business was virtually run into the ground.

Meanwhile, Indonesia was the scene of mayhem. Suspected Communists were hunted down, political groups and vandals took the law into their own hands, and some 750,000 people may have been massacred. Reports told of entire villages being wiped out in Bali and East and Central Java. Order was restored to the country by the Suharto government in 1967. The Communist party was outlawed. And on April 1, 1967, Unilever regained control of its Indonesian company, agreeing to invest $3 million to rehabilitate and expand its operations.

D. K. Fieldhouse, a British historian whose book Unilever Overseas was published in 1978, drew this moral: "Unilever survived as long as it did only because it was generally trusted by successive Indonesian governments and ministers; and even when its commercial death seemed imminent, Unilever was ready to die quietly. To say this is not to imply any particular virtue . . . Unilever recognized that its well-being depended entirely on the benevolence of a host government and that this could be solicited but not extorted by threat or force." The Financial Times once quipped that Unilever is "the nearest thing British commerce has to civil service." It does resemble a government bureaucracy in its ponderousness and stolidity. But its ability, tested again and again, to make all these diverse parts hang together is a feat of legerdemain that would make a magician proud. Especially impressive is the almost inbred sense that this is a business with no national boundaries.

Nearly all U.S. companies, even those with extensive sales outside the country, issue annual reports that are centered on domestic markets, with the international operations discussed in a separate section. Unilever organizes its annual report along both geographical and product lines. First, there is a report on Europe (64 percent of sales in 1985), then North America (17 percent), and then the "rest of the world" (19 percent). And then follow reports on the main product areas-margarine, detergents, frozen foods and ice cream, other food and drinks, chemicals-in which the fortunes (or misfortunes) of Unilever brands are reported against a worldwide landscape.

This division parallels Unilever's organizational structure in which lines of command flow from the board of directors into three channels: regional managements (geographical), product groups (detergents, frozen foods), and central staff functions (research, accounting, engineering, finance). An operating company in a particular country interacts with all these channels. In other words, if you are a Unilever manager involved in marketing a new detergent in Venezuela, your company would be reporting to a regional manager, but you would also be clued in to detergent activities in other parts of the world through the product group, and might also have recourse to one of the staff functions such as research or taxation.

The board of directors of Unilever ranges in size from twenty to twenty-five members, all of them full-time executives of the group. Three of these directors serve as the ruling troika of the company. This is Unilever's Special Committee, consisting of the chairman of the Dutch company (Unilever NV), the chairman of the British company (Unilever PLC), and the heir apparent at one of the two parents. Unilever is therefore unique in being run by a plural executive. There is no one CEO (chief executive officer). They "sit together"-in Rotterdam or London (but more often the latter)-to set top policy. They pay particular attention to management appointments. No one can be named to the chairmanship of a Unilever company, no matter how small, without the approval of the Special Committee.

Unilever counts about twenty thousand of its people as managers, ranks two hundred of them as top managers, and "stars" about twenty-five of these two hundred as the elite cadre, capable of making it all the way to the Special Committee, These are managers heading up product groups, operating companies, or staff function departments. In the mid-1980s about one thousand managers, three hundred of them British, were serving outside their native countries. The route to the top usually includes a foreign assignment. In 1986 the ruling troika consisted of Floris Maljers, chairman of the Dutch company; Michael Angus, chairman of the British company; and Johan Erbe, vice chairman of the Dutch company. All three have had overseas experience.

Maljers worked for the company in Indonesia, Colombia, and Turkey before returning to Rotterdam. Erbe, who started as a trainee in 1951 and who holds an MBA degree from the University of Wisconsin, served in Britain, Turkey, and Germany before returning to Rotterdam. Angus was a mathematics major (Bristol University) who flew for the RAF and promoted Sunsilk shampoo in France before being posted to New York in 1979 to breathe new life into the ailing Lever Brothers subsidiary on Park Avenue.

When Angus arrived in the United States, the Unilever companies were spending $160 million on advertising. He pumped it up to more than $400 million, going on the offensive with Surf, Wisk, and a new dishwashing detergent bearing the original Lever brand name, Sunlight. Previously, Lever had been looking for product niches where P&G brands were not strong.

"There is no way of outflanking them," Angus told the Financial Times. "The only solution is to meet them head on." In 1983 Lever Brothers was profitable for the first time in seven years and Angus returned to London to take the third seat on the Special Committee.

Unilever has strong ties to the Third World thanks to the operation of its plantations and the agricultural experiments it has carried on at the behest of, or in cooperation with, national governments. It's cultivating sunflowers in Kenya at the request of the government. It's running an Integrated Rural Development Program in the impoverished farming district of Etah in North India. It developed a technique for cloning oil palms that has resulted in new fruit-bearing trees in Malaysia. If you work for Unilever, you're reminded all the time about the importance of merging the company's interests with those of the host countries. And even when strong nationalist governments have taken control of Unilever companies, they frequently ask Unilever to stay on as a partner or at least as a manager of the enterprise. Unilever has partnership arrangements of this kind throughout the Third World.

Sir Kenneth Durham, a physicist who stepped down in 1986 as chairman of the British parent company, once explained to a reporter why Unilever thinks the Third World countries are important: "If you double the discretionary income of a German, he's not going to spend it on soap. But an Indonesian might-and there are 120 million people out there." (Actually, when he said that in 1985, Indonesia's population was nudging 150 million.)