DEFENSE: The Organization Man

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Says Procter & Gamble's Board Chairman Richard R. ("Red") Deupree: "Management today doesn't require specific skills. A successful manager has to have overall skill of management. It's something in you that wants to come out. Mac makes quick decisions. He makes 'em fast. No one can be right all of the time, but Mac is right a majority of the time. An executive has to be right just about all of the time. He is making maybe 100 decisions a day, but if he knows his business he won't have to think about 99% of them. It's that 1% that separates the good executive from the poor one."

"Out Like a Cigar." The personal traits that Neil McElroy brings to the Pentagon have been in him a long while. He is a strong-minded man, and he was a headstrong child, with a habit of holding his breath until he got his own way (his mother finally cured him by throwing a pan of cold water in his face). Raised in Madisonville, now part of Cincinnati itself, Neil was the youngest of three sons of a high-school physics teacher. He was reared on the run: from his earliest memory, all the considerable McElroy family energies were turned toward earning and saving enough money to send the three boys to college. The boys raised chickens in the backyard, delivered newspapers and advertising dodgers along the same route.

"We all learned to type," recalls Paul McElroy, now an engineer in Cambridge, Mass. "Father would bring home lists of teachers and set us down to the typewriter to copy them. Then he sold the list of names to advertisers [for promotion lists]. He was full of ideas." Result: Neil McElroy had saved $1,000 by the time he got out of Withrow High School, and he followed his brothers to Harvard (all three won scholarships from the Harvard Club of Cincinnati).

In Cambridge, Neil McElroy majored in economics, subbed in basketball ("I would be in for five minutes, then out like a cigar in a swamp"), tootled the piccolo, became president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter—and ran the floatingest poker game in Matthews Hall. When his devout Methodist father heard about the poker, he insisted that Neil take up bridge instead (years before, figuring his sons should sin at home if they sinned at all, he had bought them a pool table to keep them from hanging around pool halls). The upshot: Neil McElroy plays both bridge and poker, enthusiastically and well.