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But even this fast rise did not satisfy him. With his ideas about management reform already forming, he could not put them into effect in the centralized G.E. organization. Says T. K. Quinn, author (I Quit Monster Business) and onetime G.E. vice president, who helped Cordiner up the ladder: "He was outspokenly sour on G.E. He referred to the layers of fat in the company that smothered talent like his. The fat was anybody above him."
One Job, One Man. Cordiner left G.E. in 1939 to become president of ailing Schick Inc. He put the company back on its feet and was growing restless when he got a call in 1942 from Old Boss Charlie Wilson, who had taken leave as G.E. president to head the War Production Board. Wilson asked Cordiner to come to Washington. Cordiner stayed about a year, returned to G.E. as personal assistant to Gerard Swope, back from retirement during Wilson's absence.
When Wilson returned to his desk to lead G.E. into its tremendous postwar expansion, he gave Cordiner his blessing to work on decentralization plans. For five years Cordiner labored. When Wilson resigned in December 1950 to go back to Washington during the Korean war, Cordiner was ready. He was the only candidate presented by Wilson to the board. "In this big company," asked Director Sidney Weinberg, "don't we have any other man?" Replied Wilson: "Why do you need more than one?"
Within days after he took office, Cordiner's pent-up frustrations of years exploded into action. He called together 50 top G.E. executives, laid out the whole grand design of decentralization. So shocked were G.E.'s executives by the swiftness of his move that G.E. Board Chairman Philip A. Reed got to his feet to relieve the tension. He told the story, appropriate to the moment, of the little girl who began making a picture of God. Said her mother: "Honey, God is a spirit and no one knows what he looks like." Replied the little girl: "They will when I finish."
Into the Southeast. One of the biggest upheavals of Cordiner's revolution was a major shift in G.E.'s plant location. Cordiner's policy is that G.E. should not employ more than 12% of a city's labor force; he saw that future expansion would require far more than this in many towns. So G.E. set up satellite plants within 100 miles of many of its older plants, moved other divisions away from the traditional industrial belt and into the southeast, where G.E. now has 19 plants employing 30,000 workers. Old company towns were hard hit by the shift (3,500 fewer workers at Lynn, Mass, alone in the first year), and long-entrenched executives were uprooted. Cordiner has spent $1.2 billion on capital expansion, including $500 million for a three-year program launched in 1955. Chief accomplishment: $200 million Appliance Park in Louisville, Ky., a highly automated industrial city where each appliance has its own plant and management. Appliance Park now has 11,000 employees and a yearly payroll of $63 million, is Kentucky's biggest industry.