Word: geneen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...1960s and 1970s, ITT was the most voracious of a new breed of corporate giants that came to be known as conglomerates. Under the leadership of Harold Geneen, Wall Street's original Pac-Man, ITT gobbled up more than 275 companies; at one time the corporation produced everything from hydroelectric turbines to Twinkies. At its 1980 peak, ITT had annual revenues of more than $18 billion and was the 13th largest U.S. corporation. But as the company became more and more bloated, its debt surged, while profits and the value of its stock sagged...
After taking over from Geneen in 1980, Chairman Rand Araskog tentatively began to shed some of the conglomerate's less profitable divisions; last week he announced that ITT was going on the corporate equivalent of a crash diet. In the coming months, it plans to sell more than a dozen subsidiaries with assets of $1.7 billion. That will be a 12% slash in the company's current assets of $14.1 billion. Officials disclosed only a partial list of the units for sale. They include Eason Oil, the Bobbs-Merrill publishing house and O.M. Scott & Sons, which makes Turf Builder lawn...
That "monster" was largely the creation of Geneen, who became ITT's president in 1959 and chairman in 1964. He took what was basically a telecommunications company and transformed it into a vast empire that Author Anthony Sampson dubbed the Sovereign State of ITT. Says Felix Rohatyn, who as an investment banker with Lazard Freres helped put ITT together: "Under Harold Geneen, ITT was a company that essentially knew no limits. He thought anything was manageable." The result was a corporation that in 1979 had 370,000 employees in more than 100 countries. Among its multitude of ventures...
Under Empire Builder Harold Geneen, ITT devoured 275 companies and went from annual sales of $765 million in 1959 to $17 billion in 1979. But since Geneen's departure, the company's performance has slowed from go-go to nogo. Araskog has tried to revive ITT by shedding more than 60 subsidiaries, worth about $1.5 billion, but the company remains dangerously short of cash...
Crosby later became director of quality at ITT, and one day he got to put forth his ideas to Chairman Harold Geneen during an elevator ride. Geneen was intrigued and agreed to support an in-house "cultural revolution." Under the banner of slogans like "Make Certain" and "Buck a Day," Crosby created a system of quality managers throughout the company that has been adopted by other large corporations...