DEFENSE: The Organization Man

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One Way to Find Out. In 1925, planning to return for work at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, McElroy took a $100-a-month summer job with Procter & Gamble. Says he: "I was a mail boy. That's where they tell you to open and read everybody's mail. It's one way of finding out what's going on." Ambitious, hard-driving Neil McElroy found out enough to realize that Procter & Gamble, with its incentives for the ambitious, hard-driving organization man, was the place for him. He never got to business school, instead stayed on at P. & G., first as a soap salesman, then in the advertising department. In the early 1930s he had an offer from a big New York ad agency. "I'm not going to take it," he told a friend. "I'm going to stay with Procter & Gamble. But I'm not going to be satisfied to be advertising manager." At that time he was still years away from being advertising manager—but he had already made up his mind to be president.

In his race for P. & G.'s presidency, McElroy got a strong hand up from Camilla Fry McElroy, handsome daughter of a Cincinnati industrial-soap manufacturer, whom he had married in 1929. "Camille" McElroy shared his ambition, helped him overcome a personal handicap of stuttering, entered into a family partnership to get him on his way. They limited their entertaining primarily to important P. & G. people, resolved never, never to go into debt—in fact refused to buy a house until they could do it without a mortgage. In due time he bought his present grey-green stucco house (known to visiting relatives as Grand Central Station) at 3478 Vista Terrace in the Hyde Park section of Cincinnati.

This joint enterprise, along with Neil McElroy's real professional abilities, worked spectacularly. McElroy was named Procter & Gamble advertising and promotion manager in 1940, a director and vice president in charge of advertising in 1943, general manager in 1946 and president (at $285,000 a year) in 1948.

Two Washes for One Head. McElroy came up through the advertising route, but he bore no resemblance to the caricatured three-martini sincere-tie adman of Madison Avenue legend. In Procter & Gamble's tight check-and-balance organization, advertising was something of a science, tied closely to research and development, production and marketing. P. & G. advertising knew almost to the ounce how much soap each of its bubble-bathos radio programs could be credited with selling. P. & G. advertising still does the weekly wash free for 100 Cincinnati housewives, checks them closely as to their likes and dislikes. In P. & G. beauty salons, ladies have their hair washed with two Procter & Gamble shampoos—one for each side of the head—to find out which they prefer, and why. Advertising studies tell Procter & Gamble whether Tide will sell better if it is white, blue or green, whether another ounce of Joy for the same price will pay for itself in increased sales. As P. & G.'s advertising chief, Neil McElroy was death on guessing about such matters. "I don't want opinions," he said repeatedly. "I want facts."