Word: geneen
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...built the conglomerates were vastly different from the reigning generation of bosses. They were classic outsiders--non-Eastern, non-American, non-Wasp and non-Ivy. Rebels such as James Ling, founder of Ling-Temco-Vought, Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries (satirized as Engulf & Devour) and Harold Geneen of International Telephone and Telegraph stormed America's corporate towers even as students and protesters were laying siege to the nation's ivory towers...
Astute risk takers and charismatic salesmen like Ling, Bluhdorn and Geneen were among the first to see the opportunities. The bull market that began in 1962 was kinder to some companies than to others, leaving many quality firms relatively undervalued and thus takeover targets. "We had a lot of different sources of financing," says Ling, 75, of LTV, in its heyday the 14th largest company in the U.S. "But we usually swapped our companies' stock for [that of] the firms we were buying...
...bought more companies than ITT's Geneen, who during the second half of the 1960s was called "the greatest businessman alive." ITT made telephone equipment, ran hotels, built homes, rented autos, sold insurance, made grass seed and rented billboards. He believed in big and swore that "if risk is a bucking bronco, a conglomerate is the best way to enjoy the ride...
...market. A surprisingly anticonglomerate Nixon Administration crimped the most aggressive expansions in the interest of protecting what Ling calls "the smokestack-industry crowd" of old-line executives. Ling was forced out of LTV in 1970 as part of an antitrust settlement. Bluhdorn died on a company jet in 1983. Geneen piloted ITT for nearly 20 years, acquiring more than 350 firms before retiring...
...still live in an era of buyouts. But diversification has largely given way to concentration. Gulf & Western was reduced to its media component, Paramount, and then taken out by another media company, Viacom. Geneen's successor at ITT was pressured by investors to break the company into pieces. By the time Geneen died last November, all that was left of ITT Corp. was a hotel company, which would disappear into a merger two months later...