Word: ralph
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...commercial use, simply because it is the biggest U.S. electrical firm and the world's biggest supplier of power equipment, concerned with power for everything from toasters to jet engines. Its stake has been defined in terms that every schoolboy can understand by G.E.'s chairman Ralph Jarron Cordiner, 58, a short (5 ft. 7½ in.), power-packed man with restless eyes that are always trained on the future, ever watchful for risk and opportunity. Says Cordiner: "The atom is the power of the future-and power is the business of General Electric...
...Ralph Cordiner has thrown all of G.E.'s energy and know-how into the atomic future. The company has $1.5 billion in Government contracts and more than $100 million in private contracts, has committed more men (14,000) to atomics, and spent more of its own money ($20 million) to build research facilities, than any other company. So far it has not made a dime on commercial business, but its hopes for the future are bright...
...widely considered one of the chief strongholds of the organization man. Ralph Cordiner is an organization man with a vital difference: he has made the organization conform to him. ''When I took over in 1951,'' he recalls, "I told lots of people immediately that this company was not going to be a sinecure for mediocrity. The old G.E. had a reputation as a good and complacent place to work if you kept your nose clean. I wanted to get rid of that idea and create more risk and opportunity." Says G.E. Director and Wall Street Broker...
Layers of Fat. Ralph Cordiner has always made good use of his time. He was born in 1900 on his father's 1,280-acre wheat farm near Walla Walla, Wash., just eight years after a genial Quaker named Charles A. Coffin merged two electrical firms to found General Electric. Cordiner went to small Whitman College, where he worked his way through school by doing odd jobs and selling wooden-paddle washing machines for the Pacific Power & Light Co. He went to work for Pacific Power after graduation, became such a star salesman that he was soon lured away...
...merchandising department in Bridgeport, Conn, to "get closer to the hub of the corporate wheel." He hiked sales in the electric heating division 60% in four years, became assistant to Bridgeport Boss Charles E. Wilson. When "Electric Charlie" Wilson moved up to become executive vice president of G.E., Ralph Cordiner stepped into his shoes at Bridgeport. He was only...