(FORTUNE Magazine) – JAN PRISING is a Swede who runs an American-owned company out of an office overlooking Lake Varese in Italy. He speaks five languages -- but not Italian -- and conducts most of his business in English. Is he unique? Not anymore. Prising, 51, is a corporate Viking, part of a growing cadre of executives who can manage across borders. Nor is the way he got his job so unusual, though it would have been a scandal only a few years ago. A headhunter lured Prising, a 21-year veteran of Sweden's Electrolux, by offering salary and bonuses that could reach a very un-European $500,000 a year. The hunt for the global manager is on. From Amsterdam to Yokohama, recruiters are looking for a new breed of multilingual, multifaceted executive who can map strategy for the whole world. The action is especially heavy in Europe. To prepare for the wide-open world of 1992, companies are pushing out their traditional managerial corps of stodgy engineers and aristocrats. For replacements, they have turned to specialists they once haughtily ignored, executive search firms. And the headhunters have turned to U.S. multinational corporations as the most fertile hunting ground. The market for executive search is exploding. According to a study by Economist Publications Ltd., the London-based financial publishing firm, the net revenues of Europe's dozen biggest executive search firms have been climbing more than 15% a year, reaching almost $300 million in 1989. And that's just the beginning. Says Lester B. Korn, chairman of the world's biggest executive search firm, U.S.-based Korn/Ferry International: ''Europe will be the world's fastest growth market of the 1990s, outperforming even the Pacific Rim.'' Europe's headhunters are just as glamorous, highly paid, prestigiously educated -- and at least as cosmopolitan -- as the candidates they're paid to track down. One Swiss giant and four mainly U.S.-based competitors dominate the industry (see chart). The leader in Europe, and the third-biggest search firm in the world, is Zurich-based Egon Zehnder International. About 70% of Zehnder's $80 million in revenues comes from Europe. Run by founder Egon Zehnder with the low-key efficiency of a private Swiss bank, the firm ranks first or second in most big European markets, including France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and West Germany. While Zehnder is pushing to expand its small U.S. business, the company's rivals are using their strong bases in the U.S. to attack Europe. The most European is SpencerStuart, a solid old-line firm that is owned equally by partners in North and South America, Europe, and the Far East, and derives 36% of its $80 million in revenues from Europe. Cultivating a swankily aggressive image is the world's second-largest firm, Russell Reynolds Associates Inc., with revenues of $85 million according to Executive Recruiter News. A powerhouse in financial services in London, the firm has chauffeur-driven Jaguars shuttle clients between the City of London and its stately offices in Saint James Square. The two fastest-growing firms -- Heidrick & Struggles and Korn/Ferry -- are winning new business all over Europe. Heidrick & Struggles, low-key and Continental in style, has surged from virtually nowhere in 1985 to generate ! European revenues of $21 million. It is No. 1 in France. Korn, which takes the hard-nosed American approach to the business, runs its European operations from Brussels. The company stumbled badly in Europe before hitting its stride in 1985. Chairman Korn has grand plans for Europe. He wants to quadruple European revenues to $100 million by 1995. The executive search boom came first to Britain because of financial deregulation and industrial restructuring that created strong demand for managers with a knack for cutting costs. The focus then shifted to the Continent. Northern Italy is in the midst of an industrial renaissance that has spawned companies hungry for European expansion -- and managers who understand foreign markets. ''Increasingly executives have a responsibility for more than one country. The key is the ability to see how each decision affects the rest of the European chessboard,'' says Philippe De Backer of Carre Orban & Partners International, a hot European-based recruiter. The fastest growth is in West Germany, where headhunting was illegal until the late 1970s. Experience with other companies is increasingly prized. ''Today it's essential for a 45-year-old marketing manager to have had several jobs,'' says David Kimbell, worldwide chairman of SpencerStuart. Thorn EMI, the British music, software, and appliance rental company, transformed a stuffy management accustomed to lifetime employment into a far more daring -- if less stable -- team of entrepreneurs. From 1983 to 1988 the company replaced about 130 of its top 150 managers, at least half through headhunters. Today the average executive is 44 and has had three previous jobs, vs. none eight years ago. Says personnel director Don Young: ''I expect senior executives to commit to about five years.'' According to headhunters, the best cross-border managers started out with U.S. multinationals. Says Baldwin Klep, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles: ''More than 50% of the executives I place in Europewide positions came directly from U.S. companies.'' Zehnder's search last summer for a new chief executive for Transmanche Link, the Franco-British construction consortium building the $12 billion tunnel under the English Channel, ended in Nepal with American Jack K. Lemley, 56. The onetime Morrison Knudsen Corp. executive was a consultant on a hydroelectric project outside Katmandu. The Chunnel's construction has been plagued by cost overruns and bickering between Transmanche and the owner, Eurotunnel. Transmanche wanted one of the world's best project managers -- in a hurry. A strapping 6-footer with a bruising handshake, Lemley unwinds practicing white-water rafting from Colorado to New Guinea. His resume reads like a glossary of the world's most ambitious construction projects, including a 13.5-mile water tunnel under Manhattan in the early 1970s and a segment of Saudi Arabia's $7 billion King Khalid Military City a decade later. Lemley wins praise from both Eurotunnel and his own employees by vastly improving coordination between the separate French and British construction crews. The project is on schedule for completion in 1993. ''It's an advantage to be a third nationality,'' says Lemley. ''Unlike a British or a French manager, I can't be accused of taking sides.'' The new marketing manager for Cadbury-Schweppes PLC's European beverage operation is Joost Pabst, 38, a Dutchman recruited by Egon Zehnder from Colgate-Palmolive Co. in New York City. Until recently Cadbury operated its $650 million European soft-drink business as a collection of national subsidiaries. As a result, its Schweppes brand had radically different pricing and advertising in different markets. The Germans saved their expensive tonic for special occasions, while the Spaniards downed it as a summer thirst quencher. Pabst, based in Barcelona, is creating a single image for Schweppes in Europe, that of a classy but popular soft drink. ''What sold me on this job was the chance to manage brands Europewide,'' says Pabst. ''Sure, there are differences in tastes. But they're not as big as people think. We're doing everything possible to achieve economies of scale by exploiting the similarities between markets.''

The successful hunt for Jan Prising illustrates how restructuring is driving the new recruiting surge. Last year Whirlpool Corp., the U.S. appliance maker, paid $470 million for a 53% share of the $2-billion-a-year European appliance business of Dutch electrical giant N.V. Philips' Gloeilampenfabrieken. To find someone to run his new unit, Whirlpool CEO David Whitwam turned to Roddy Gow, the managing director of Russell Reynolds's London office. After a three- continent search, Gow finally got Prising in his cross hairs -- as well as some moose -- during a hunting party sponsored by Russell Reynolds. A headhunting spree has produced a United Nations of sorts in the Paris headquarters of Alcatel. Says human resource manager Paul Claudell: ''We don't want French domination.'' The joint venture of Cie Generale d'Electricite and ITT Corp. includes CGE's telephone businesses and ITT's European operations. The company is out to win a big share of the emerging pan-European market for telecommunications equipment. Of the 120 top executives in Paris, 60% aren't French. Alcatel's finance department is motley: an Italian, a Swede, a Portuguese, a Dutchman, and a Belgian, all recruited in the past two years by firms such as Korn/Ferry and Egon Zehnder. The Swede, 32-year-old Harald Bauer, was plucked from a top finance post at a large Swedish trading company to become controller for Alcatel's subsidiaries in Scandinavia and parts of France. ''Having a Swede in this job definitely improves communications,'' says Bauer. ''The management here is still very French and hierarchical. With the mix of nationalities, that should change quickly.'' NO ONE IS ENJOYING the hard-won respect of executive searchers more than Egon Zehnder. The tall, balding Zehnder, 60, looks like a sober-suited banker but exudes the gusto of an entrepreneur. A father of five, he lives in Zurich in a seven-bedroom house furnished with 18th-century French antiques and equipped with an air-conditioned wine cellar. There is a swimming pool behind the house, but Zehnder would not dream of swimming a lap. His prescription for good health is typically offbeat: Avoid exercise. ''It's basically unhealthy and stressful,'' he says. ''Just look at those skiers with their wheezing, unhappy faces!'' Scion of a prominent Zurich family, Zehnder earned a law degree at the University of Zurich and then headed for the U.S. and Harvard business school. On his way, he spent a few days traipsing around Manhattan, vainly using his broken English to try to sell Swiss candles to Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue. The next summer Zehnder sold kitchen knives door-to-door in Los Angeles, working nights as a stevedore. After graduating in 1956, he worked briefly for advertising agency McCann- Erickson in New York City, returning to Europe in McCann's Dusseldorf office. In 1959, Zehnder accepted a personal offer from Spencer Stuart to open his first executive search office in Europe. ''I knew Stuart was onto something,'' says Zehnder. ''The executives working for my advertising clients were mostly unqualified pseudo-aristocrats who owed their jobs to family connections.'' He ran into plenty of resistance in those early days. He usually found his mailbox filled with threatening letters from companies whose executives he'd tried to recruit. He says, ''I kept telling the presidents and personnel managers that if you believe in competition for products, why not for senior executives?'' Zehnder quit to form his own firm in 1964. Says he: ''Stuart wanted to throw cocktail parties and press functions, to do things the U.S. extrovert way. I knew if I behaved discreetly and professionally, search would eventually be accepted in Europe.'' FROM THE START, Zehnder used his recruiting skills to staff his own firm. For Europe, he hires Europeans and Americans in their early 30s who have earned MBAs from the best U.S. business schools or top international institutions such as Insead in France. A recent recruit is Erik Slingerland, 34, a Dutchman with a law degree from the University of Zurich and an MBA from the University of Virginia. He was hired from Swiss pharmaceuticals company Ciba-Geigy -- where he worked as a controller in Brazil and Switzerland. Slingerland speaks French, German, English, and Portuguese, as well as Dutch. Says he: ''Egon convinced me that we were as important to clients as other professionals such as lawyers.'' More to the point, the business is fabulously lucrative. Zehnder, like all the other big firms, never works on contingency. For each assignment, the company charges a fixed fee, depending on the number of offices, consultants, and hours needed to carry out the search. Assignments range from finding $80,000-a-year marketing managers for local subsidiaries of multinational companies to recruiting chief executives earning $1 million or more. For a typical four-month assignment -- finding a $250,000-a-year chief financial officer for a big West German company -- Zehnder would charge between $80,000 and $120,000. All of the firm's 67 partners, including Zehnder, are equal shareholders. Each year the partners split up as much as $15 million in bonuses and dividends. Amazingly, the money is divided not according to performance but based on seniority. Partners with 15 years or more of service earn up to $600,000 per year, while new partners in their late 30s make about $200,000. Since compensation isn't related to billings, Zehnder says, colleagues in different offices work together smoothly instead of squabbling over how to divide fees. Turnover is low. But many competitors are unconvinced. ''Zehnder's system is absolutely crazy,'' says Gerard Clery-Melin, the Frenchman who heads Heidrick & Struggles Europe. ''It encourages people to do nothing. We have fights, tension, and turnover -- it's healthy. Stability is not as important as Zehnder thinks.'' Like the candidates they're seeking, the Euro-headhunters now operate across Europe rather than in separate national markets. Heidrick & Struggles reckons that revenues from Europewide assignments -- almost nil a few years ago -- now account for 15% of European billings and are increasing at 40% a year. The firm has established a group of eight consultants in Europe who work exclusively on international assignments. Each consultant handles a search in its entirety, interviewing candidates wherever they live. THE DASHING new image of the Euro-headhunter befits Russell Reynolds veteran Gerardo Seeliger. A handsome 42-year-old Spaniard with an economics degree from West Germany's University of Freiburg, Seeliger competed on the 1972 Spanish Olympic sailing team alongside his close friend King Juan Carlos. He served as marketing director of West German sporting goods maker Adidas in the mid-1980s. Such hands-on experience is a must for handling international searches, a niche he helped create in Reynolds's London office. Seeliger typically spends part of each week in London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Milan -- where he speaks all the local languages -- and jets home to Barcelona for weekends. For Seeliger, the big challenge of the 1990s will be overcoming a severe shortage of Euro-managers. He says the problem isn't the attitude of the gung- ho young executives: ''Managers in their 30s are totally different from their fathers. They're hungry; they'll move to a new European city tomorrow.'' Rather, it's that few companies -- even globe-trotting Dutch or Swedish ones -- systematically develop international managers by rotating young executives through a series of foreign assignments. Finding -- and training -- the best cross-border managers will be crucial to reaping the benefits of 1992. Headhunters will be indispensable. Seeliger, in fact, plans to open his own consulting business to find and train managers for Eastern Europe. But the future belongs to companies that not only find the whiz kids but also hang on to them. The winners will be companies that stop paying lip service to 1992 and prove they believe in it -- creating the exciting, cross-border jobs that tomorrow's Euro-managers will thrive on.

BOX: TOP FIVE IN EUROPE Revenues (in millions) Europe Total Company 1. Egon Zehnder International $55.0 $80.0 2. SpencerStuart $28.6 $79.7 3. Russell Reynolds Associates $28.0* $85.0 * 4. Korn/Ferry International $26.1 $103.3 5. Heidrick & Struggles $20.6 $66.8

*Estimate.