Hughes put his principles on the line in 1990 when, in the midst of the political and economic turmoil following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he urged GM's senior management to locate a new plant for the company's Opel line in the East German town of Eisenach. Eisenach seemed a long shot at best. Even Hughes admits that his first trip to the proposed site had an intimidating aura. "On a dreary January day, we drove over the border," he recalls. "The East German countryside, still under communist rule, bristled with barbed wire and watchtowers."

But Hughes's initial assessment of the factory's potential was right on the money. He and his team brought hope and capital to highly motivated workers anxious to put aside the past and to justify the decision by GM - the world's largest automobile manufacturer - to invest in them and their community. Eisenach, Hughes believes, is an example of how GM and other Western companies can play a role in accelerating the development of new economies and profoundly improve the prospects for those countries.

"By starting fresh in Eisenach," Hughes explains, "we were able to introduce lean manufacturing processes to workers who were ready for a new approach. Eisenach is today the most efficient plant in our network." This "new plant, new team, new concept" approach has generally worked well elsewhere for GM, Hughes says, in part because "when substantial capital and resources are thus committed, you go out of your way to understand the requirements of your customers."

Hughes himself has demonstrated similar attentiveness to General Motors's needs during the last 25 years. Raised in a working-class family in Cleveland, he attended the General Motors Institute prior to HBS and has been with GM since leaving Soldiers Field. He rose through the ranks, including service as president of GM Europe, to his current post heading international operations, which he now runs from Detroit after several years of doing so from GM's Zurich offices.

As a GM "lifer," Hughes has witnessed strikes and harmony, lean years and boom times in the high-profile automobile industry, a sector still looked to as a traditional mainstay of the American economy. So questions about the current Asian economic crisis elicit from him the wry, seen-it-all-before observation that "when you expand, it's always at the wrong time." After all, Hughes points out, with planning and construction for a new plant requiring two years or more, it's not surprising that conditions may change by the time a facility is ready to open.

Instead, what is central to any expansion decision, Hughes argues, is whether or not, over a ten- to twenty-year time frame, a facility is needed in a given location. "In dynamic economies, such as China, Thailand, India, Poland, and Argentina, even if there is a one- or two-year setback, there will be growth," he declares. For a man who rightly saw the potential in a town that looked like a Cold War relic, such faith in the power of markets sounds a lot like well-founded pragmatism.

- Mary Ellen Gardner