EXECUTIVES: Rise of the Bookkeeper

By his own account, Richard Charles Gerstenberg got his first big break at General Motors by helping justify the company's price increases in hearings before the Office of Price Administration during World War 11. "I spent months in Washington working on the detailed end of the assignment," he says. "I really got a short course in the cost and pricing problems of General Motors in those days." Now that wage and price controls are back, G.M. faces some of the same problems, and its directors want Gerstenberg again to try to raise earnings in a Government-restricted, profit-squeezed economy. Only...