Word: geneen
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...Textron, once a confederation of textile companies, is running ads making the point that the company now makes almost everything but textiles. "Think you've got Textron down pat?" the ads read. "What about electronic systems, golf carts, helicopters, chain saws?" Another company troubled by anonymity is Harold Geneen's ITT. "You can stop 15 people in the street and not one will know what ITT is," Geneen has lamented. "That bothers...
Basic Economics. Hal Geneen's drive for recognition has a personal as well as corporate side. Born in England (his very British mother was improbably named Aida DeCruciani), he was less than a year old when his father, a manager of concert performers, moved the family to New York. By Hal's fifth birthday, his parents were separated. Mother, who remains a major influence in his life (Geneen's father is now dead), sent him to a succession of boarding schools and summer camps. At Suffield (Conn.) School, the older boys got Springfield rifles for military drill...
...persevered, graduated from Suffield, afterward got a job as a page on Wall Street, where he developed an enthusiasm for finance. At night he studied accounting. At Manhattan's Lybrand Ross Bros. & Montgomery, where he was an accountant for eight years, Geneen became known as a hard-driving young man whose grasp of business, recalls Lybrand Partner Philip Bardes, "went far beyond the balance statement." Geneen next moved through corporate-finance jobs at American Can Co., Bell & Howell and Jones & Laughlin Steel, combing their ledgers, as a colleague of those years later put it, like "a bloodhound...
...chance came at Boston's troubled Raytheon Co., where he hired on in 1956 as executive vice president with orders from the electronics company's president, Charles Francis Adams, to "make some money." Geneen tightened up Raytheon's cost controls, arranged fresh credit from the banks, squeezed out new working capital. He saw to it that Raytheon paid its bills on time, to take advantage of the standard prompt-payment discount; at the same time he insisted that Raytheon's debtors pay up pronto. Anxious to infect the entire company with his own profit consciousness, Geneen...
Adams' mandate was carried out-Raytheon's earnings increased fourfold during Geneen's three-year stay-but Geneen was by now casting about for a larger policymaking role. At the same time, several corporations were anxious for a man who would make policy, and Geneen was sought out by an executive recruiting service for the top job at ITT. In May 1959 he walked into Adams' office, abruptly announced: "I'm resigning." The day the news came out, Raytheon was the most actively traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, dropping 6½ points...