IBM chief Jacques Maisonrouge is dead at 87

Jacques G. Maisonrouge, a French native who was among the first non-Americans on the board of International Business Machines Corp. after helping the company expand globally, has died. He was 87.

He died at his home in Paris on Jan. 25, according to a death notice in The New York Times.

As head of IBM's World Trade division, which managed international expansion, Maisonrouge helped the company become one of the first global corporations. Thomas J. Watson, IBM's chief executive from 1914 to 1956, adopted the slogan "World Peace Through World Trade," as a corporate mission.

For a company history, Maisonrouge recalled traveling in segregated South Africa in the late 1970s, when black employees at IBM's Johannesburg plant lived in neighboring Soweto township and were subject to a curfew. Maisonrouge said he won permission to have the employees join him for dinner at a whites-only hotel in Johannesburg. "It was beautiful," he said. "We did things that were progressive." Maisonrouge began his 36-year career with IBM in 1948 and became assistant to the sales manager of IBM France in 1954. By 1965, at 41, he was IBM's top executive in Europe. "If I worked for a European-owned company, I would not be as high as I am now," he told Time magazine that year. "I'm too young."

He retired from IBM in 1984 when he was 60. Two years later, the French government named him the nation's director general of industry, charged with making the nation's companies more competitive. He was, according to a New York Times account, the first person to move from private industry to the top civil servant post in the French Industry Ministry without any previous civil-service experience.

"It's a very interesting thing," he told the Times. "I've always noted the easy passage in the United States from government to industry to the university, and I've tried to convince my compatriots that it would be a good thing. Now, I'm a prisoner of my speeches."

Jacques Gaston Maisonrouge was born on Sept. 20, 1924, in Cachan, a suburb south of Paris, to Paul Maisonrouge and the former Suzanne Cazas, according to Marquis Who's Who.

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He joined IBM after graduating from Ecole Centrale Paris, one of France's top engineering schools. With his wife, Francoise, he moved to the U.S. for the first of what would be four long stays, during which he remained a French citizen.

In 1956, he joined IBM Europe as manager of market planning and research and in 1958 became a regional manager, responsible for business in 10 European countries.

He was named vice president of IBM's World Trade division in 1962, working in New York until he became president of IBM Europe in 1964. He was promoted to president of the World Trade unit in 1967, chief executive in 1973 and chairman in 1976.

His election to IBM's board of directors came in June 1983.

His survivors include his wife and their five children, Christine, Florence, Sylvie, Francois and Anne-Sophie, according to the death notice.