TPSA makes Ameritech, Centertel textbook losers

The Harvard Business School is taught by case-study methods, and the profs are always watching for cutting-edge material that can illustrate core concepts - of how a mature company gets knocked sideways by a newcomer, how Westerners going into foreign markets lose their shirts.
They did one several years ago on Gerber Food's troublesome joint venture with Alima SA, which had been one of Eastern Europe's leading baby food processing companies. Much of the case study dealt with the paranoia present by people who expected the worst from Gerber - and how Gerber, as a relative newcomer to international markets despite its age, was less than savvy in the way it handled some of the complexities of post-Communist Poland.
In the case of Ameritech and its Centertel joint venture with TPSA and France Telecom, business analysts and anthropologists would have a field day looking at the friction between the Western and Polish partners. One observer says it is almost the worst-case situation of a Western partner throwing its weight around in ways that appeared to frame TPSA in the role of enemy, not partner.
Months of that and what you get is a slam dunk from TPSA where it hurts the most, a potentially crippling blow to Centertel/Ameritech's ability to find another Polish partner for a shotgun merger in time to apply for one of the GSM digital licenses.
* * * *
Some people had hoped there would be a short shelf life for the jointly bylined article in Gazeta Wyborcza by owner/editor Adam Michnik and Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, about the communist past and the need for new coalitions today between progressives of the Solidarity revolutionaries and the ex-communist progressives.
Why Michnik chose Cimoszewicz as his partner for an article shocked many people, says Halina Bartnowska, who edits the four-year-old journal Polis, published by the Institute of Political Studies. She says Michnik "gets all wrapped up in prophesizing" and "maybe he thought it would open a new vista." It didn't.
In addition to the abysmal timing (it was perceived to have hurt Jacek Kuron, the Freedom Union presidential candidate and a longtime Michnik friend), Bartnowska says, the idea itself is off base. "It's not possible to speed up this process."
But the article has stirred enough of a storm that Aleksander Kwasniewski has been responding to it, saying it is wrong to make a single judgment on all of Communism that it was unquestionably rotten when there were plusses, including education provided for generations of Poles. He says it also is impossible to generalize about all former communists; they differed widely.
* * * *
Antoni Kaminski, who has been advising Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz on foreign policy, is exploring ways Poland might be a resource for some of its neighbors to the East, especially Ukraine. Kaminski recently returned from a trip to Kiev to look at ways Poland might go beyond rhetoric in sharing its insights about the transition to a market economy.
"It is possible to put forward an example of our policy in agriculture, for example, which is privately owned, and to discuss many of their programs in view of our own experience." And he adds: "We should have a policy of bringing stability to those regions instead of turning our back on the East and appealing to NATO countries to take us in, and not really knowing why we want in there."