Policy in Gum

MANAGEMENT

Philip Knight Wrigley, 48, who has voting control of 31.8% of the world's biggest chewing-gum works, fired himself from the presidency of his $64,000,000 company last week. His main reason was almost too simple: he thought it would be better for the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. of Chicago.

Principles & Policies. In an extraordinary letter (mailed at his own expense) to his stockholders, Phil Wrigley explained that "the company's policies were departing from those upon which the business was founded," that "there have been differences of opinion between other members of the Board and myself," and that he thought his opinions had a better chance of prevailing if he were merely "an active director ... in a position to think and act as an individual and not as part of a necessarily cumbersome piece of machinery." To reporters he added shrewdly: "As leader of a directors' meeting, you listen; as one of the directors, you can talk."

The cardinal principle upon which the Wrigleys have always operated came from Phil's father, the late William Wrigley Jr. Florid Supersalesman Wrigley founded the business in 1891, talked gum policy to his serious-minded son from the time he was six and said he wanted to go into the business. As Phil puts the Wrigley principle now: "My father used to feel that if you were used to doing things a certain way, that was reason enough to change."

But by the time Phil, then 29, succeeded his father as president in 1925, and increasingly after the old man died in 1932, Wrigley's aging board of directors, several of them family stockholders, leaned to ward the status quo. As readers of the Chicago Tribune, some of them also leaned toward isolationism. Now they lean toward the hope that the war will be over soon and Wrigley's can go back to the dear dead days again. As president, and per force responsible to them, Phil had to fight every step of the way to take the com pany about as far into the war as a gum company can go. Wrigley's packages more than half of the Army's K rations at a slight loss ; makes preferential sales to the Services and to essential industries, regardless of long-standing trade relation ships, and has converted its radio programs to war talk.

"Essential" Industry. What this policy did to Wrigley's present business -- in the face of the stigma of making a "pleasure product" -- turned out to be mostly good. For the first time gum became "essential." Wrigley's, which sells more than half of the chewing gum in the world, was able to keep operating profits up to $22,900,000 last year, 7% above 1942, and even to squeeze out a small increase in net income (to $6,800,000). Besides that, Phil Wrigley collected a fine file-drawer full of testimonials on what gum does to increase efficiency.

He moved out of his rose-carpeted office last week to a separate part of the Wrigley Building to make way for his successor, the 70-year-old ex-vice president and treasurer, James Clifton Cox, but he took with him a lot of postwar ideas about gum policy. K rations have taught him to hope for a large packaged soup-to-nuts business, from relief lunches for starving Europeans to substitutes for the dinner pails of U.S. factory workers.

Health & Taxes. Phil Wrigley says that all his business practices are "selfish." (He recently canceled all his insurance because the new tax law made it liable to estate taxes along with his other assets.) He has not in recent years collected his full salary ($75,000), and does not expect to miss it much now. He has always docked himself for the time he spent on extracurricular business, notably two other interests inherited from his father: famed Catalina Island, off the coast of California, and the Chicago Cubs (who finished fifth in the National League last year).

But mostly Wrigley wants to indulge in his favorite sport of being Wrigley's largest stockholder. Though he told the other stockholders last week that he was "going into 1944 well worn down physically and with a consequent lack of enthusiasm and vigor," no one who knows him expects him to regain his health away from the business.

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