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Basic Economics. Hal Geneen's drive for recognition has a personal as well as corporate side. Born in England (his very British mother was improbably named Aida DeCruciani), he was less than a year old when his father, a manager of concert performers, moved the family to New York. By Hal's fifth birthday, his parents were separated. Mother, who remains a major influence in his life (Geneen's father is now dead), sent him to a succession of boarding schools and summer camps. At Suffield (Conn.) School, the older boys got Springfield rifles for military drill while the younger ones got only wooden ones. "So there I was," he recalls, "the smallest kid in the school, carrying my little wooden rifle with one hand, and trying to keep my puttees up with the other."
Hal persevered, graduated from Suffield, afterward got a job as a page on Wall Street, where he developed an enthusiasm for finance. At night he studied accounting. At Manhattan's Lybrand Ross Bros. & Montgomery, where he was an accountant for eight years, Geneen became known as a hard-driving young man whose grasp of business, recalls Lybrand Partner Philip Bardes, "went far beyond the balance statement." Geneen next moved through corporate-finance jobs at American Can Co., Bell & Howell and Jones & Laughlin Steel, combing their ledgers, as a colleague of those years later put it, like "a bloodhound on the trail of a wasted dollar." But Geneen, who says he has never been one to "gamble on what other people did," grew anxious to start taking risks on his own.
His chance came at Boston's troubled Raytheon Co., where he hired on in 1956 as executive vice president with orders from the electronics company's president, Charles Francis Adams, to "make some money." Geneen tightened up Raytheon's cost controls, arranged fresh credit from the banks, squeezed out new working capital. He saw to it that Raytheon paid its bills on time, to take advantage of the standard prompt-payment discount; at the same time he insisted that Raytheon's debtors pay up pronto. Anxious to infect the entire company with his own profit consciousness, Geneen on one occasion rented a local high school auditorium, used it to deliver a lecture on basic economics ("Sales are the volume of business done expressed in dollars") to over 1,000 Raytheon engineers.
Adams' mandate was carried out—Raytheon's earnings increased fourfold during Geneen's three-year stay—but Geneen was by now casting about for a larger policymaking role. At the same time, several corporations were anxious for a man who would make policy, and Geneen was sought out by an executive recruiting service for the top job at ITT. In May 1959 he walked into Adams' office, abruptly announced: "I'm resigning." The day the news came out, Raytheon was the most actively traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, dropping 6½ points. ITT rose only half a point, but it was the third most active stock. Set in motion by Geneen, Raytheon today flourishes without him. As for ITT, Wall Street figured that the company was in for some changes under Geneen, and it was right.