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Bulging with five-year plans, confidential memos and balance statements, the dozen-odd attache cases are seldom out of their owner's sight. At work in New York, he lovingly lines them up on window ledges in his twelfth-floor office overlooking Park Avenue; at night, he takes a couple of them back to his East Side apartment for bedtime reading. For his frequent trips to Europe, he picks up four or five and carries them along on the plane. And on weekends, he lugs several to his weathered, two-bedroom cottage in New England, where he pores over their dog-eared contents hour after hour.
Only when Harold Sydney Geneen, 57, goes fishing off Cape Cod aboard his $100,000 yacht, Genie IV, does he temporarily travel without his attache cases. "Otherwise, my office is where I am," explains Geneen. Inasmuch as he is board chairman and president of the globe-girdling International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., that could be almost anywhere. A man who walks fast, talks fast and thinks fast, the sturdy (5 ft. 10 in., 180 lbs.) Geneen churns with the ambition of a man half his age. In the space of eight years, he has rejuggled ITT from top to bottom, transforming it from a stodgy, disjointed telecommunications invalid into one of the most successful of the highly diversified new-breed corporations known as "conglomerates."
Geneen himself shuns the conglomerate tag, prefers to call ITT "a unified-management, multiproduct company"—a term that, for some reason, he considers far tidier. Whatever the label, Geneen's ITT has become a hearty concoction. A huge amalgam of some 150 affiliated companies in 57 countries, it hums with new purpose in its traditional field: the manufacture of communications equipment around the world. At the same time, ITT's 204,000 employees are pushing into fresh territory. Backed by an annual research-and-development budget of $220 million, ITT scientists are at work on such sophisticated projects as automatic landing systems for aircraft and the use of laser beams for spacecraft docking.
Under Geneen, the company developed the Strategic Air Command's control switching network, maintains Washington's "hot line" to MOSCOW, operates the Air Force's Distant Early Warning (DEW) system. It even drew on its overall management know-how to pick up the thankless task of running the federal Job Corps project at Camp Kilmer, which was bound to be controversial if only because residents of surrounding New Jersey communities did not want a conclave of so-called juvenile delinquents in their midst. After a noisy start, the camp has gone out of the headlines, and even its early critics now concede that it is well run.
"Carry the Ball." Because of the variety of ITT's main-line operations, Hal Geneen rejects anything remotely smacking of a "one-industry mentality."