Management: The Corporate Cezanne

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Simon finds that admonition difficult to heed, though he clearly broods over the hostility he brings out in others. "My hostilities are usually showing," he says, in the vein of introspection of which he is so fond. "But I do get rid of my anger very rapidly. Some people are born with peace of mind. I was not. In the Dostoevskian sense, I am the suffering man; I know this about myself. And I know now that working my way out of it is a very gratifying experience. I have gone through a process of reconciliation with myself. I had ulcers for perhaps 30 years and when they were operated on, I took an introspective look at myself. I don't like to be rough; it has even been difficult being firm with people. But I feel a very constructive part of being firm, I feel a constructive part of being rough. I feel a constructive part of letting my anger express itself."

Simon's friends are not necessarily surprised by the critics who accuse him of being harsh, stubborn and inconsistent. "I don't think he has a precise, eternal objective," says U.C.L.A.'s Murphy. "His objective changes. I think his fascination is with the process." As for Simon's wife, she seems to understand: "He may go to bed at night intending to fly to New York in the morning, but by morning he has changed his mind. He is extremely flexible, and I think it is because he is constantly in the process of becoming." People around Simon have a way of adopting his way of talking.

Compulsive Telephones The urgent, flexible world of Norton Simon revolves around a seven-day work week during which he spends some days in his study at home, others alone in an isolated office that he keeps on Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard, still others at an office in his Fullerton head quarters, a glass, stone and aluminum building designed for Hunt by Architect William Pereira. On weekends he and his wife frequently move north to a sprawling house by the Pacific Ocean at Lido Isle, and at least one week a month Simon travels to the East Coast to attend board meetings and see to new business.

Simon's workday is so individual and changeable that he has no routine in the usual sense. He rises between 6 and 7 a.m. in his house in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, begins the day's first round of telephone calls over a leisurely breakfast of tea, toast and fruit. For Simon, the telephone is a compulsive device: he has four unlisted telephones at home, three more in his blue-carpeted office at Fullerton.

When he arrives at his office in the morning he invariably demands, "What's new? What's new?", grabs up sheaves of telephone messages, then complains: "Is that all? Is that all?" In his office he swivels constantly like a metronome while he scribbles short answers to memos, receives visitors or pores over the pieces from newspapers and magazines that are clipped for him by Stella Russell, by his secretary, and by his Negro houseboy who, Simon insists, has a nose for news. Eternally restless, he constantly tweaks his ears, rubs his eyes, pulls at his neck, scratches his ankle, and chews constantly on a phenomenal number of Italian caramels that somehow do not seem to increase his steady weight of 180 Ibs. And, of course, he frets, worries and broods all the while.