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Lennox, 65, smoothed relations with the United Auto Workers, whom McCardell had infuriated during a six-month strike, and got them to accept a 29-month contract that saved the company $200 million. Lennox also consolidated many plant operations, concentrating manufacturing muscle on Harvester's most profitable products, especially trucks. Staff cuts lowered the worldwide work force to 32,455 at the end of 1983, from 65,640 two years earlier. Even office space at the company's Chicago headquarters was slashed from twelve floors to 7½, while the corporate staff withered to 600, from 1,200.
So far, the shrinking act seems to be working. Losses for 1983 were $485 million, vs. $1.74 billion the year before. Truck sales are strong, and the farm equipment business is sprouting healthily. The best part came in January, when Lennox told shareholders that Harvester's creditors had agreed to refinance its multibillion-dollar debt. Without that understanding, the company would undoubtedly have been forced into bankruptcy.
Wickes. It was plainly a job for Ming the Merciless, a.k.a. Sanford Sigoloff, 53. He earned his Flash Gordon nickname the hard way: turning around ailing companies by ruthlessly cutting, cutting, cutting.
Among those he has saved: Republic, the Los Angeles manufacturing and service company and Daylin, the West Coast retail chain, which he led into bankruptcy and then out again. In Wickes, a diversified seller of almost everything from furniture to apparel to gifts, Sigoloff confronted another bona fide disaster, and his largest rescue mission ever. It had little merchandise, not enough employees to sell what there was, hardly any credit and no cash.
Sigoloff s first move after taking over Wickes in 1982 was to file bankruptcy papers and thus protect the firm's modest assets. To Sigoloff, there seemed to be no other choice: in the 15 previous months, Wickes had lost more than $400 million.
Its list of hungry creditors filled 3,000 pages with 250,000 claims.
Ming the Merciless fired nearly a quarter of Wickes' 40,000 employees. He sold off 15 money-losing operations, such as North American Video and Wickes Leasing, which had been added during the fat growth years of the 1960s and '70s.
The toughest move was closing Aldens, the fifth-largest U.S. catalogue-showroom operator, and breaking the news to its 2,600 employees, many of whom had worked at Aldens all their lives. Sigoloff had sought a buyer for the business, but none could be found. Fearing reprisals for the shutdown, he hired bodyguards for Aldens executives, who even suspected that their food might be poisoned. Said Sigoloff of the closings: "You're paid to make those calls. You're a professional, and you don't fall in love with businesses."
At Wickes, Sigoloff blossomed into a star of television commercials.
"Sure, they call me the toughest retailer in America," he says in one ad, blue-gray eyes lasing into the camera.
"But you've got to be tough."
Like other heads of revitalized companies, Sigoloff is nervous about the future. "We have put a Band-Aid on," he says. "But all of a sudden, if the economy stumbles, the customers may disappear."