Audacious TRW
As manufacturers of sophisticated hardware ranging from ball bearings for Viet Nam to microcircuits for the moon, executives of TRW Inc. (formerly Thompson Ramo Wooldridge) are about as thoroughly caught up in the modern world as businessmen can be.
But one week each year they retreat to a tranquil farm hard by the hill-country hamlet of Guildhall, Vt. (pop. 250), to eat strawberry shortcake on paper plates and set their sights for the coming year. Last week they were at it again, gathering in a 150-year-old barn for a round of seminars and lectures (sample topic: "The Government-Industry Paradox: Serenity, Seduction or Surrender") aimed at keeping their dynamic company on the move.
They have succeeded rather well so far. At the Vermont get-together in 1961, when sales were barely $400 million, TRW brashly predicted that the figure would top $1 billion by 1970. Last week it was confirmed that the company is three years ahead of schedule, will reach $1 billion in sales (probable profits: $40 million) this year. Cheered by that achievement, TRW set a more audacious goal: a $4.5 billion year by 1975.
Far Out & Close In. TRW as it now exists was put together in 1958, but its parent company, Thompson Products, a leading auto-parts maker, dates back to 1901. In 1953, a pair of brilliant, Caltech-educated scientists, Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, left Hughes Aircraft Co. and, with the Thompson firm's financial backing, founded their own company. Winning a contract for the systems engineering and technical direction of the Air Force's intercontinental ballistics missile program, Ramo-Wooldridge (TIME cover, April 29, 1957) quickly became one of the U.S.'s most respected "think factories." Its eventual merger with Thompson was a natural alliance of far-out and close-in engineering.
Big and diversified as it has become, TRW refuses to consider itself a conglomerate for the simple reason that its product lines are so compatible. With main facilities still divided between Cleveland (Thompson) and Los Angeles (Ramo-Wooldridge), the company manufactures automobile parts (pistons, valves, fuel pumps) and aircraft components (turbine wheels, hydraulic pumps) in the East, turns out most of its aerospace and electronic gear in the West. The tidy mix brings TRW 56% of its sales from commercial and industrial customers, 44% from Government contracts.
The company expects its automotive and aircraft business to keep on growing, but it is at TRW's dazzling "Space Park," a campuslike complex in the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, where it is truly operating on the frontiers of technology. Inside its gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings, TRW produces a broad range of delicate equipment, from convergence coils for color television sets to the most advanced spacecraft components. A participant in 90% of the Government's missile-space projects, it is currently building Comsat communications satellites, NASA's Orbiting Geophysical Observatory and engines for the Apollo project's Lunar Excursion Module.
End Runs. While an old Thompson Products hand, J. D. (Dave) Wright, 62, serves as TRW's chairman and chief executive, energetic, visionary Si Ramo, 54, remains its guiding spirit (Wooldridge, his onetime partner, is now semiretired and engaged in private research, has written two technical books). Ramo is particularly enthusiastic about the company's growing work in "civil systems," the application of computerized methods to such problems as urban renewal and air pollution. Above all, Ramo believes in being highly selective in the choice of markets. In spacecraft propulsion, for example, TRW makes only small engines. In aviation, it concentrates on jet-engine parts. Instead of bucking competition across the board, confided Ramo at his company's Vermont hideaway, "we have always gone for the end runs."
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