Word: geneen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Surprises. In 1959, two years after Behn's death, the leadership of ITT passed to Harold S. Geneen, a small, owlish man who was trained in accountancy, and seems to prefer hamburgers to French cuisine. Even so, Geneen cannot resist comparing himself to Behn: "He was a man of his time; I am a man of my time." Born in Britain 63 years ago, Geneen came to the U.S. at the age of one. A wizard with figures, Geneen began his career as a New York Stock Exchange page and rose from accountant to executive positions in such companies...
...Under Geneen, ITT has come to own some 260 companies in 86 countries. Crucial to his management is a system that can keep executives at meetings for up to ten days a month. The system is designed to avoid surprises. Ironically but predictably, the vaunted "no surprise" system produced shocks on the political front. Predictably, because most men who are trained to think in quantitative terms are insensitive to nuance and subtlety. Sampson fails to stress this inherent characteristic of business bureaucracies. He also fails to meet the challenge of Geneen's complex personality and conflicting drives...
...some ways, Geneen is close to genius: the management method he has imposed on ITT disciplines and tames territorial chieftains who might otherwise rebel and enables him to check the performance of a widely-almost wildly-diversified company. In other ways Geneen is a gambler on a monumental scale. Sampson neglects this facet of Geneen, although he does show that when Geneen acquired Hartford Insurance he knew full well that the antitrust division of the Justice Department would oppose him. In short, Sampson concludes, Geneen was under the utmost compulsion to try to change the trustbusters' collective mind...
...Harold S. Geneen, chairman of the board of ITT, perhaps the most imperialist of U.S. corporations. Aside from trying to topple the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, Geneen, via Dita Beard, seems to have bedded down comfortably with the Nixon Administration. ITT's rise to industrial preeminence was accompanied by all sorts of shadiness, even beyond what one has come to expect from American big business...
...stock has fallen from a high of 60⅜ in January to as low as 30% at one point last month; it closed last week at 37. Lately, ITT shares have sold for as little as eight times annual per-share earnings, a low for the Geneen era. That is a painful blow to corporate ego. ITT executives have long pointed proudly to the company's record of profit growth, thus implying that its stock should sell at a price-earnings multiple considerably higher than that of the blue chips in the Dow Jones average-which currently...