CORPORATIONS: ITT's Big Conglomerate of Troubles

A corporation exists by public acceptance.

—ITT Annual Report for 1971

HARDLY any statement could have been more spectacularly mistimed.

When it was written several months ago, International Telephone and Telegraph seemed the beau ideal of corporate success: under the twelve-year reign of Chairman and President Harold Sydney Geneen, it had run up a dazzling profit-growth record by expanding into almost every conceivable business in some 80 countries round the world. But by the time the report was issued in March, ITT was enmeshed in a series of controversies that have seriously undermined its "public acceptance." Indeed, they have provided a case...

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