Word: townsends
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Levin-Townsend Computer Corp., which owns the Bonanza, has suffered the sharpest decline of all the casino companies-an 87% fall from last year's high of 57½ to last week's 7⅛ a share. In the last nine months of 1969, the company had a $15.9 million loss. Too small and poorly managed to compete with the giants, the Bonanza has been closed and may be sold. Unless they find a buyer, officials of Levin-Townsend say that they may be unable to pay off some notes held by Kerkorian, the previous Bonanza owner...
...chops to the corporate system are from a new book, Up the Organization, a breezy assault on business inefficiency clearly destined for the best seller list. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has ordered a printing of 100,000, a run usually reserved for sex-saturated novels. The author, Robert Townsend, is an executive best known for driving Avis from a distant second in the car-rental field to wealth and prominence in only three years (1962 to 1965) as its chief executive officer. (He now is owner of a small newsletter, The Congressional Monitor.) His book is more...
...advice to newly arrived chief executives: "Fire the whole advertising department and your old agency." That is just what Townsend did on moving to Avis from American Express. He sought out Doyle Dane Bernbach. William Bernbach, the agency's chief, came up with a theme that did not entirely please anybody. The only honest statements he felt the ads could make were that the company was second largest and that its people were trying harder. ownsend agreed, and the rest is history...
True to his conviction that bigness usually leads to calcification, Townsend stepped out of Avis when it was acquired in 1965 - despite his opposition - by the giant conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph. "If you have a good company, don't sell out to a conglomerate," Townsend advises. "Conglomerates will promise anything for your people, but once in the fold your company goes through the homogenizer along with their other acquisitions of the week...
...proof of the widening gap between business and the consumer, Townsend proposes a simple test: let an executive place a call to his company and pretend that he is a customer seeking help. If he reacts harshly to the almost inevitable runaround, he should then try phoning his own office and experience the obstacle course he has set up. As one way of clearing away the communications barriers between the boss and his customers and employees, Townsend suggests getting rid of secretaries - an idea not likely to reduce the book's publicity potential. He has a few words about...