POWER GENERATOR
By ALAN DEUTSCHMAN

(FORTUNE Magazine) – American managers may soon find themselves competing on their home turf with one of Europe's hottest CEOs -- a 6-foot 3-inch Swede with a goatee. Percy Barnevik, 48, is leading Asea Brown Boveri of Zurich in its $1.6 billion cash acquisition of Combustion Engineering, a power equipment company that is No. 131 on the FORTUNE 500. Combustion will be a big addition to Barnevik's already enormous empire. Formed two years ago through a fusion of Swiss and Swedish giants, ABB is a $20-billion-a-year operation with 200,000 employees at 1,100 companies in 140 countries. Its largest businesses come from making power generators and transmitting electricity throughout Europe. The Combustion deal puts ABB into the potentially lucrative U.S. market for producing energy by burning garbage. The son of a small-town printer, Barnevik studied economics in Gothenburg, Sweden, before spending two years at Stanford. Says Egon Zehnder, head of his own international executive search firm in Zurich: ''He is certainly one of Europe's very top entrepreneurs. He has a fast, highly creative mind, an extremely demanding management style, and the ability to cope with an incredible workload.'' Bet he just can't wait for 1992.