U.S. Business: Is It True Bristol Has More Fun?

Men say the chief good is health, beauty the second, wealth the third.

—Plato, 345 B.C.

Health and beauty is our business.

—F.N. Schwartz, 1965

By cultivating the first two goods, Frederic Schwartz's company has collected plenty of the third. Since he took charge in 1957 of the Bristol-Myers Co., whose attention to health and beauty is centered on products as varied as penicillin and Ipana, profits have risen an average of 20% a year and the company has become a Wall Street favorite. Last week Bristol-Myers reported that its earnings in 1964 jumped 21%, to $23 million, as sales rose 15% to $265 million.

How does Bristol-Myers do it? Schwartz, a balding and white-fringed executive of 58, runs the company by several credos. One is to blanket three expansive consumer markets—prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs and beauty preparations—with Bristol-Myers products. Another is to pit the company's major divisions against one another by bringing out several types of the same product; thus Bristol-Myers markets a variety of hair tonics (Vitalis, Score, Fitch, Vitapointe), cold pills (Bromo-Quinine, Clinicin, 4-Way) and deodorants (Mum, Ban, Trig). Still another Schwartz principle is to stimulate in his subordinates what he calls "the constant abrasive of disagreement." His top men, most of them in the 40s, are distinctly non-sycophantic. "They argue with me," says Schwartz, "and they keep me working as hard as I ever have in my life."

Blonde Lipstick. Schwartz is preoccupied with the drug market partly because he suffered from tuberculosis as a child, fell three years behind in school in Springfield, Mass.; later he went to work as a salesman for a surgical-instruments company. Rejected by both the Army and the Navy in World War

II, he joined up as a Pentagon civilian, headed the Army's blood-plasma and whole-blood programs, and eventually won a lieutenant colonel's leaf. In 1945 he joined Bristol-Myers, a business that had begun to grow arthritic, later became the first non-Bristol to boss the once family-run firm.

Schwartz built up the firm's ethical-drugs division, bought his way to strength in proprietary drugs and toiletries by acquiring Grove Laboratories and Clairol. The biggest supplier to the nation's bottle blondes ("Is it true... blondes have more fun?"). Clairol is test-marketing a line of lipsticks, nail polishes and other cosmetics keyed to its hair colors. In a business of tough competitors and fickle customers, Schwartz spends $10 million yearly to develop new products, more than $75 million on advertising. Among Bristol-Myers' contributions to American civilization: the first buffered aspirin (Bufferin), the first non-peroxide hair coloring (Born Blonde), the first roll-on deodorant (Ban).