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Gravel for Grass. Sherman Fairchild amply meets his own definition of managers with vision. "If you can do constructive thinking along unorthodox lines in business," says IBM President Thomas Watson Jr., "you have it made. Sherman Fairchild is able to think along unorthodox lines." Fairchild's departure from orthodoxy begins right at the front door of his town house on Manhattan's East 65th Street, where he conducts all the affairs of his companies. The house is the height of a three-story house, but actually contains six levels built around an inner courtyard. Instead of staircases, long, floating ramps connect the staggered floors. In the midst of Manhattan's bustle, the soundproofed, air-conditioned house is a quiet and sunny refuge whose ten rooms are filled with evidences of Fairchild's fertile mind. These range from green courtyard gravel that looks like grass (he had stones coated with green ceramic) to a complete control booth for recording in his lavish living room, and louvered shutters fronting the street that can be opened or closed by pressing a button.
Fairchild once kept an office in Rockefeller Center, but moved to his home for convenience after a major intestinal operation (a colostomy). His condition has not slowed his pace. He receives a steady flow of visitors at his dining-room table, experiments with sound in his control room^ with color in his photography room, with new components for cameras and rec ords in his basement workshop. He keeps a mechanic busy in a Long Island labora tory translating his ideas into working models.
Fairchild is a prodigious reader who subscribes to more than 200 technical and general publications, tears out articles, jots notations on them and shoots them off to officials of his companies. He dictates a steady stream of letters (about 80 over a normal weekend) into tape recorders scattered through the house, has them typed by secretaries working in two shifts in a basement office.
No One Had the Nerve. "I'd still like to invent the products," says Fairchild, "but the business has become too big for that." Fairchild believes that it is not enough simply to develop a product that is slightly better than a competitor's. He had no interest in bringing out a movie camera that was only an improvement on cameras on the market. But when his re searchers came to him with the idea of a home movie sound camera, he gave en thusiastic approval. "Fellows from the camera company came to see me and said they could produce an 8-mm. camera with sound," he says. "It had never been done before, but, having built a lot of recorders myself, I knew it could be done. So I gave those fellows encouragement.''