The Profit of Profit

Heap abuse on Madison Avenue and General Motors, say what you want about the morals and aesthetics of business, certainly. Point out, too, that the gusty days of the Robber Barons and Captains of Industry have passed away with the Golden Age of Comedy, and that the day-to-days of the organization man just don't have any kind of romantic sock to them.

Now don't get up on Cloud Five about it, but isn't it possible to have your fancy caught for a moment by a man who annually can add $1 million and 3,000 employees to his company, even though his management policy would be downright boring to trustbusters and muckrakers?

Myles Mace, who returned to Harvard this fall as professor of Business Administration, has done just that for the past three years, as a director, vice-president, and chairman of the Management Committee of Litton Industries in Beverly Hills, California.

As you might suspect, Mace is a tall, trim, and solidly built man, who wears black horn-rimmed glasses for reading, smokes mentholated cigarettes, and works at his desk in shirtsleeves that are clean enough to smell white. His disposition is unbearable until he has had his first cup of coffee in the morning, but Mace explains this as "an old Norwegian habit."

Somewhat of a traveller, Mace's favorite spot is on the Matterhorn-Zermatt, which is reached only by cog railway. And those who expect to live on an expense account in the future, or like fine food, might want to jot down his pick of New York restaurants: Miako's for steak and lobsters, Christ Cella, and, downtown, Peter's Backyard, on West Tenth Street.

Mace, unlike many Americans who have worked in private industry, has a great deal of respect for the officers who staff the U.S. military agencies: "They are competent, dedicated men who work for less money than they would receive in private business, and we're lucky to have them. The same goes for the faculties of business schools."

That Mace is dedicated to the ideals of American Business is all but undeniable, if only from his description of Litton president "Tex" Thornton: "One of the greatest leaders of modern industry...imaginative, insists on sound planning, aggressive, dynamic, inspirational, very high sense of integrity."

Yet Mace has exchanged Sunday coast-to-coast flights and weekday airborne personnel conferences for commuting between the Business School and his home in Dover. And after helping to raise Litton's sales from $8.7 million in 1955 to $83 million, he has returned to Cambridge to teach and work as caretaker for a foreign business education program.

Having turned out to be an unreformed professor after all, Mace says that the difference between business and academic accomplishment is one of "the tangible versus the real," that the deadline of meeting a class is just as "stimulating" as that of meeting a financial quotation, and the same is true of the Faculty Club when compared with a Los Angeles business men's club.

If Myles Mace carries out a threat he made recently, a how-to-succeed-in-business book may appear within the next few years under the title The Gospel According to St. Mace. And believers of the new Word, whether they attend lunch hour worship at the church on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, or a baccalaureate service at a university chapel, need have only the grace of competency.