Corporations: Mightier than the Pencil

Nattily dressed, a junior accountant named Robert Philip Adler reported to his new job at the ailing Waterman Pen Co. one August day in 1955. He was no sooner in the office than he found him self in hip boots, helping to shovel up the muddy debris of a flood that had immersed the plant. Adler, now 33, has since cleaned up at pen making in an even bigger way. As president of the renamed and revivified Waterman-Bic Pen Corp., he has expanded the Milford, Conn., firm into the nation's leading manufacturer of...