Word: kaiser
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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More in awe than anger, a competitor once declared that Henry John Kaiser was successful because he was ignorant-"he never knew what he couldn't do." Kaiser put it another way: "If I don't dream I'll make it, I won't even get close." Whatever the reason for his success, Henry Kaiser, who died last week at 85 while asleep at his home in Hawaii, put together a remarkable complex of companies that turn out 300 kinds of products in 180 plants in 41 countries and have assets of nearly $3 billion...
...Kaiser's achievements were famous. Until World War II he had mainly been a road, bridge and dam builder. But he decided to make ships because the U.S. needed vessels in a hurry. "I'm a builder," Kaiser explained, "and if you call yourself a builder, you ought to be able to build anything." Using prefabricated parts and assembly-line techniques in an industry that had never known either, Kaiser's seven shipyards built 1,490 cargo ships and 50 baby aircraft carriers before the war was over. This amounted to one-third of all U.S. ships...
Grand Scale. When Kaiser needed more cement for his prewar construction projects, he founded a cement company and one to supply sand and gravel. As an industrialist he followed this idea on a grander scale. Because steel shipments were slow, he organized Kaiser Steel at Fontana, Calif., with a $123 million Reconstruction Finance Corp. loan that brought considerable criticism from Congress and Wall Street alike. He dabbled in airplanes, and with Howard Hughes conceived the idea of a ten-engine cargo plane that never got off the drafting board. Later he founded Kaiser Aluminum...
Expanding his employee health service, he set up the Kaiser Foundation that today provides medical services in 18 hospitals and 40 clinics for 1,500,000 West Coast members. One of his most notable projects-and notable failures -was making automobiles. He and Joseph W. Frazer bought a surplus bomber plant in 1945 with a Government loan of $44 million, began turning out Kaisers, Frazers and, later, Henry Js. They sold well until postwar supplies of new cars caught up with demand: then, competition from Detroit's Big Three put Kaiser-Frazer out of the auto business. Kaiser repaid...
...Alfried Krupp such a humiliation was intolerable. In the years since the firm began as an Essen foundry in 1811, the House of Krupp had been courted by Bismarck, the Kaisers and Hitler. Kaiser Wilhelm I called it a "national institution." Wilhelm II was Alfried's godfather. And at Alfried's birth, his father Gustav wrote to his directors: "May he grow up in the Krupp works, and through practical work acquire the fundamentals he will require to take over the responsibility-laden duties...