Word: litton
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...other noteworthy Hughes alumni, Charles ("Tex") Thornton and Roy Ash, left in 1953 to found Litton Industries, a pioneering conglomerate that has turned out some prominent graduates of its own.* Singleton joined them, started Litton's inertial-guidance systems, and within six years built the company's electronics-equipment division from scratch into an $80 million-a-year operation. Says Singleton today: "When I went to Litton, I needed money and experience. I got both there." By 1960, he also had an itch to start his own business. He teamed up with Litton Colleague George Kozmetsky (now dean...
...Charles Bluhdorn, Gulf & Western, which a decade ago was an ailing Houston auto-parts company, has gobbled up one company after another (among them: Paramount Pictures, New Jersey Zinc) to balloon into a $1 bil-lion-a-year operation. A pioneer in the conglomerate-building field, Los Angeles' Litton Industries, which was started almost from scratch by Chairman Charles B. ("Tex") Thornton (TIME cover, Oct. 4, 1963) and President Roy Ash in 1953, is still building. Last week, Litton (1966 sales: $1.2 billion) arranged to pick up yet another property, Pennsylvania-based Landis Tool...
Visible & Viable. The amount of control conglomerates wield over their crazy-quilt acquisitions varies widely. Many of the leading ones keep their headquarters remarkably lean. Litton is proud of the fact that it runs its far-flung empire with a central staff-secretaries and all-of fewer than 250 people. Chairman Rupert C. Thompson Jr. of Textron Inc., a $1.1 billion-a-year complex that makes everything from Sheaffer fountain pens to Bell helicopters, houses his entire headquarters in 1½ floors of a small office building in downtown Providence. So decentralized is Dallas' fast-growing Ling-Temco-Vought...
Critics say that the conglomerates are little more than glorified holding companies. But companies like Litton Industries take the position that they are helping their holdings to grow syn-ergistically-by monitoring them for signs of trouble, providing them with computer and research services and risking money on projects they might not undertake on their own. Diversification has obvious benefits for the conglomerates, buffering them against bad weather within a single industry. To Andrew Carnegie's dictum to "put all your eggs in one basket and watch them," Gulf & Western's Bluhdorn replies: "If you have all your...
...Watts?" Litton President Roy Ash, a member of the Coalition, could hardly disagree. Said the Urban League's Whitney Young: "The people gathered in this room can turn the country around...