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He never stops his headlong pace to speak or idle with his office staff, lunches hurriedly in the executive dining room before closeting himself for the afternoon with executives to discuss problems ("Let's start from the Garden of Eden and work this through"). Each evening he takes home a portfolio of work—and expects other G.E. executives to do the same.
G.E. is widely considered one of the chief strongholds of the organization man. Ralph Cordiner is an organization man with a vital difference: he has made the organization conform to him. ''When I took over in 1951,'' he recalls, "I told lots of people immediately that this company was not going to be a sinecure for mediocrity. The old G.E. had a reputation as a good and complacent place to work if you kept your nose clean. I wanted to get rid of that idea and create more risk and opportunity." Says G.E. Director and Wall Street Broker Sidney Weinberg: "If you did something wrong, Cordiner would send for you and tell you you were through. That's all there would be to it."
The Big Split. To get G.E. in shape for risk and opportunity, Cordiner put through one of the most thorough management revolutions in the history of U.S. industry. "American business," he says, "spends too much time on thinking about this month, this year. It ought to spend more time preparing for 15 to 20 years from now—the next business generation." Another Cordiner complaint: business is so big that individual initiative is often stifled. Men who once would have been bosses of their own companies have too little chance in a corporation to run their own shows. Cordiner's answer to both problems: massive decentralization.
G.E. was broad and unwieldy after a decade of tremendous wartime and postwar growth. Cordiner split it into 27 autonomous divisions containing no small companies just the size "for one man to get his arms around." The head of each company is the boss, just as if he were running his own company. Within a loose framework of policy, he makes day-today decisions, sets his own budget, raises or lowers prices, sets up his own design and marketing policies, even makes capital expenditures up to $200,000.
Under this system, division heads and Cordiner himself are "freed up"—Cordiner's favorite expression—to concentrate on long-range planning. Gone are assistants, coordinators and committees. Says Cordiner: "G.E. has no place for committees as decision-making bodies. A committee moves at the speed of its least informed member and too often is used as a way of sharing irresponsibility."
Cordiner shares his responsibilities with an executive office composed of President Robert Paxton, 56, and 13 vice presidents. The heads of the nine service divisions (e.g., accounting, management consultation, marketing) report directly to Cordiner, bear the chief burden of long-range planning and research. To Paxton, himself an old operating man, report such operating-group executives as Arthur F. Vinson. 51, head of G.E.'s important heavy industrial goods section, James H. Goss, 51, head of consumer products, and Cramer V. LaPierre, 54, boss of defense and atomics.