A Very Individual Manager

From the outside, the weatherbeaten brick building on Mad River in Waterbury, Conn., looks like one of those venerable edifices in an old New Eng land mill town. Inside, the company that makes its headquarters there has won an entirely different image. Under Chief Executive Officer Malcolm Baldrige, the 166-year-old Scovill Man ufacturing Co. has become one of the fastest growing enterprises in the U.S.

A maker of metal products, from 3,300-lb. brass ingots to casings for Cha nel No. 5 perfume, Scovill drifted downhill for years. The firm lost $131,-000 on sales of $121 million in 1958.

"This was due to group management, to lack of financial controls and lack of goals and incentives," says Baldrige.

He was hired in 1962, at the age of 39, to turn the company around. "We do not like participative management, group management or committee man agement," he says. "We want individ ual accountability and responsibility."

Nebraska-born Baldrige worked his way up from pouring iron to the presi dency of Connecticut's Eastern Co. be fore being tapped for the Scovill job.

He started by making drastic cuts in overhead expenses, reducing the staff by 18% (annual saving: $3,000,000), and offering numerous vice presidents line jobs or early retirement. Baldrige eliminated committee meetings altogeth er, cut reports down to the bare min imum and held his eight division man agers answerable for "unnecessary ac cumulation of statistics." Scovill's top management now consists of Baldrige and a lone executive vice president.

Baldrige's austere and highly indi vidualistic management has raised Sco vill's sales to 1966's record of $388 million and its earnings to $15 million.

Last year reduced consumer spending and the consequences of stockpiling in expectation of a long copper strike caused sales to dip to $352 million and earnings to $13 million. But Baldrige expects 1968 sales and earnings to be every bit as good as in 1966.

During the past two years, Scovill has been expanding through acquisitions of companies in housing and home building. It thereby hopes to escape overdependence on brass-mill earnings, which accounted for some 55% of company sales in the early 1960s. In 1967 Scovill bought NuTone Inc., maker of built-in home products. This year it added Caradco, the second largest window-frame producer in the U.S. For an even better balance, Scovill firmly intends to bring down the share of brass to 20% of total sales through future acquisitions.

In the executive office where he plans his company's future, Baldrige does not act like a harsh produce-or-quit type. Soft-spoken and diffident, he has a unique way of arriving at hard decisions. He leaves his antique desk and, while thinking out the problem, tries to rope an aluminium contraption that represents the hind legs of a steer.

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