Executives: Turns at the Top

EXECUTIVES At two very different companies, a pair of very different industrial pioneers have picked new men to guide their firms' futures. The new lineups formed as stormily at one company as they did smoothly at the other.

Fairchild Camera and Instrument has a chairman who would just as soon stay out of direct management. But, as Sherman M. Fairchild, 72, once said, "When things don't go well, I butt in."

Last fall the multimillionaire founder did just that when his firm, once the brightest of the glamour companies, began to lose money. Plunging prices in its once enormously profitable semicon ductor business, plus losses in other areas (duplicators, oscilloscopes, recording equipment), caused a $7.7 million deficit for 1967. In rapid succession, Fairchild saw Chairman John Carter to the door, assumed the chairmanship himself, assigned President Richard Hodgson to sell off unprofitable divisions, then turned Hodgson himself out to pasture. Since May, when Hodgson was moved up to a newly created vice-chairmanship, the company has been without a chief executive officer.

Last week that post was taken by new President C. Lester Hogan, 48, who moved from Motorola into Fairchild's offices at Mountain View, Calif.

A Harvard physics professor before he joined Motorola ten years ago, Hogan built the company's semiconductor busi ness from scratch to tops in the field.

At Fairchild, where semiconductors accounted for two-thirds of the company's sales ($209 million last year), the tiny silicon chips will be Hogan's forte.

Wall Street seemed pleased by the move. Last week, as six former Motorola colleagues joined Hogan at Fairchild, Motorola stock dropped 4¾ points, while Fairchild rose 5⅛ — a $4.7 million filip for Sherman Fairchild, who holds 16% of the stock. Fairchild enthusiastically greeted the "younger lead ership" but hastily qualified the phrase to mean "leaders that aren't about to retire." That, he added, was "something which I don't have any thought of doing, incidentally."