Corporations: An Appetite for the Future

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(See Cover) The husky, ruddy-faced man looked like a tough trail boss in a TV western as he mounted his palomino and set off across the rugged mountain country north of Los Angeles. He wore thread bare khaki trousers over his riding boots, a red Western shirt and a modified stetson, and packed an automatic pistol to deal with any rattlesnakes, bobcats or mountain lions he might encounter.

For several hours he rode, traversing mountain and valley, following deer trails and nudging his horse skillfully along rocky paths. Occasionally, he crunched out a cigarette on a heavy leather glove worn as a horseback ashtray, or reined his mount to a halt and gazed out over the green valleys below.

This was no performer re-creating the Old West, but the boss of a huge and exciting corporation that is dedicated to a relentless pursuit of the future. He is Charles Bates Thornton, 50, the chairman of California-based Litton Industries—and he was busy on horseback at the most important facet of his job: thinking. When "Tex" (he came from a small Texas town) Thornton has a problem to mull over, he finds that he does his best thinking on a solitary 30-or 40-mile ride through the mountains, where he can "look at the world down there, and the world beyond. It is my way of getting away from it all, getting out where I can clear my head of the traffic of everyday business."

Thornton has plenty of traffic to clear. Since he took over Litton just ten years ago next month, when it was only a tiny microwave-tube company, it has developed into one of the most remarkable growth companies of the age. In that decade, Litton has increased its sales 18,570% and its earnings 10,175%. It has never had a quarter in the red. In one of the greatest acquisition sprees of all time, it has absorbed some 40 other corporations, now has 71 plants in the U.S. and twelve other countries.

Litton now ranks as the nation's 100th biggest corporation, with sales that have already passed the half-billion-dollar mark and will probably reach $750 million this fiscal year. By next year, if this growth continues, its sales should lift through the billion-dollar mark and put it among the top 50 U.S. companies. As for Thornton, the organizer of Ford's celebrated Whiz Kids and onetime boss of such talent as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and present Ford President Arjay Miller, Litton's success has made him a millionaire 40 times over. It has also made millionaires out of 20 other Litton executives.

Broad & Ambitious. For want of a better description, this remarkable company is formally classified as an electronics firm. That is a bit like calling Albert Schweitzer an organist. Litton is really an amorphous giant with interests and appetites as broad as the universe. Its 200 products range from hulking nuclear submarines to tiny electronic tubes that can send radio and TV signals back to earth from millions of miles out in space. Its plants turn out the electronic brains that have transformed business methods and the trading stamps that have conquered the housewife. Litton makes guidance systems that fly planes virtually without human help, devices that generate light beams to burn holes in thick steel plates and gyroscopes that smooth the sickening roll of a Queen Elizabeth caught in an ocean storm.