PERSONAL FILE

sb"We are used to running with a full head of steam here at IBM. I intend to keep it that way." With this determination, Albert L. Williams, 50, moved into the presidency of the International Business Machines Corp., succeeding Tom Watson Jr., 47-year-old son of the man who built IBM. Watson, who wants time for broader activities, will continue as IBM's chairman and chief executive officer, but will concentrate on long-term policy while Williams takes over day-to-day operations. First attracted to IBM by a newspaper report that Tom Watson Sr. was one of the nation's highest-paid executives, Williams (who earned nearly $240,000 last year) is now the company's top financial expert.

sbAs successor to one of the auto industry's most flamboyant figures, the Ford Motor Co. chose a reflective intellectual. To replace Top Stylist George Walker (TIME cover. Nov. 4, 1957), Ford named as a vice president and the industry's youngest styling director Eugene Bordinat, 41. Bordinat, who styled the Comet and the 1961 Lincoln Continental, is convinced that the U.S. public does not know what it wants in car styling and must be led to good taste by the professionals. The direction in which he will lead: "I like to try to keep things as simple as possible."

sbAn experienced operations man was what the Sinclair Oil Corp. wanted--and what it got last week by naming President Edward L. Steiniger, 58, as chief executive officer, succeeding P. C. Spencer, 67. Steiniger made his reputation in the tough Venezuelan fields, where during one three-year period (1941-44), he brought in 105 wells out of 108 attempts. Intense and quick-witted, he believes in studying countries where the company drills, once delighted Haile Selassie with his knowledge of Ethiopia. Under Steiniger, Sinclair will spend a major part of this year's planned $182 million capital expenditure to step up its search for oil.

sbFor those who regard electronic brains with a hostile eye came support from an unlikely source: Bernard Benson, 39, English-born president of California's Benson-Lehner Corp., manufacturers of data-processing equipment. As more and more personal information about Americans is fed into computer drums from social security forms, credit records and employment files, said Benson, only a "deliberate effort to guide technology in the direction of freedom" will save the U.S. from "a big-brother machine that is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-watching." Another Benson worry: the tendency to forget that a computer's judgment is no better than the information that has been fed into it. Says he: "If a statement comes from a computer--Mamma mia, it's like coming from God."

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