Corporations: An Appetite for the Future

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Litton's Monroe division is one of the leaders in sales of calculating machines. Its Westrex division ranks first in sales of sound-recording systems, and its Western Geophysical division first in seismic explorations. Litton is the nation's third biggest private shipbuilder. Its systems division sells more inertial-guidance systems than anyone else, and its Sweden-based Svenska is the world's second largest maker of cash registers. Across the world, Litton men are mapping underground volcanic activity in Hawaii, searching for oil beneath the North Sea, scouring the jungles of Surinam for precious minerals.

To many businessmen used to working within well-defined industry lines, all this seems more like a potpourri than a company. Almost every time that Litton announces a new product or acquisition—which is almost every week—there is a new flurry of predictions that at last the fast-stepping Texan has gone too far. If Tex Thornton's business philosophy often confuses his critics, it is perhaps because it is so breathtakingly broad and ambitious. He is interested in change, and pursues it wherever he can. Litton's present and future are tied together by a commitment to capitalize on the products, projects and processes that are growing out of a great new technological revolution.

Like a Jigsaw Puzzle. That revolution is reshaping the comfortable contours of the world's industries. The age of science has not only had a vast impact on society, but has also transformed the world of business more thoroughly than anything since the Industrial Revolution. Business has always been faced with changing situations, but never has the change been so constant, powerful and full of hazards. "The flowering of technology goes on faster and faster," says George R. Harrison, M.I.T.'s dean of sciences, "because man's understanding of science is like working out a jigsaw puzzle—the more pieces fit together the easier it is to fit more pieces together."

A proliferation of new materials has threatened such well-rooted industries as steel and textiles. Companies searching in their laboratories for new products can hardly get the products to market before someone else has duplicated them—or produced better ones. The whole new space-military complex is devoted to the idea of constant change and advance. Scientists have discovered so many basic new ways of doing and making things that one bright scientist in a lab can sometimes render obsolete the basis of a whole industry. Many companies, particularly those that have long concentrated on a few products, find it increasingly hard to come up with the management know-how and the funds to finance the advanced research needed just to keep up.