Word: whitneys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...late 1970s, though, Whitney and President J. Tracy O'Rourke realized that the marketplace was changing, and Allen-Bradley would have to evolve to survive. The company was too dependent on the machine-tool industry and its biggest customer, Detroit's automakers. Both were reeling under the attack of lower-cost foreign competitors. Although Allen-Bradley's domestic sales had not been severely hurt, the day when they would be seemed just around the corner...
What to do? A planning team assembled by Whitney came up with the answer: Allen-Bradley, since its founding a parochial company doing almost all its business in North America, would aggressively expand in Europe, but with a major new twist. Instead of making industrial controls almost exclusively to American standards, the company began designing them to the specifications of the International Electrotechnical Commission, the European arbiter. And instead of buying a foreign company to make the controls, which several competitors had done, it would make them in Milwaukee, in a new facility...
Thus was born the idea for Department 260. Says Whitney: "The light bulb came on." But an unprecedented degree of automation would be required to pull it off. Reason: a representative contactor that sold for $20 in the U.S. sold for just $8 in the highly competitive markets of West Germany and Australia. To make a profit at the lower price, Allen-Bradley had to get costs down. By using automated equipment, the company could produce contactors for 60% less than it could by relying on a manual assembly line. "Labor costs," says Whitney "obviously had to be a nonissue...
...tangled affairs of former White House Aide Michael Deaver took a few more twists last week. Whitney North Seymour Jr., a former U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, was named by a special three-judge panel as the independent counsel to investigate allegations of misconduct against him. Seymour was instructed to investigate all of Deaver's suspect dealings and not be limited to the two cited by the Justice Department: Deaver's approach last summer to then White House National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane on behalf of a tax break for Puerto Rico, and his participation in a meeting last October with...
...your electorate and a very poor judgment in this matter, and I will be urging voters in my class, other alumni, and other members of the Harvard community to register their discontent in a variety of ways. At the very least, you owe us all a public explanation Whitney Davis '80 Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows