The small Publicly Held Company on Long Island was in trouble. It was running out of cash and, worse yet, bank credit. Only the tiny satellite division I managed in New England made a profit, and that was being drained off. (In effect we were the child supporting the parent.) Barely two years old, the division was producing a then-innovative product that allowed the fabricator of a plastic item such as a toy to color the plastic material at one-third the cost of the usual method.

Meanwhile, a large, successful, Publicly Held company in New York had opened a facility in Atlanta to produce the same type of product. Management at that facility, after two years of mounting losses, had become desperate. The necks of the brass were in jeopardy.

The New York company approached me to identify and solve their problems. They offered a hefty salary and an executive position. Having lost confidence in the company I worked for, I took the job.

 The Plant was in an industrial suburb, but its administrative staff worked from luxurious offices in a downtown skyscraper. I resided, at company expense, in a high-rise hotel nearby. On my first tour of the enormous plant, I was impressed by the array of equipment and the sophisticated lab, with its costly, state-of-the-art analog computer. The operation was obviously the realization of an engineer’s dream. By comparison, my old operation was in the dark ages- but it made money. But by the time the tour was over, I knew what was wrong.

• The plant was designed for lengthy production runs, but the market was still young, and orders for large volumes were rare.

• Because the machines were so large and sophisticated, they were down more often than up.

• The company chose an unfortunate market to pursue almost exclusively. The highly competitive and fickle automotive field imposed strict specifications on its suppliers and showed no mercy when breached.

After a few weeks I also observed:

• Computer formulating, then in its infancy, took more time and labor than the old-fashioned way, and the formulations were often inferior.

• The plant consistently failed to meet delivery dates

• Management had a misguided goal: running a technologically superior plant—a showplace to court their automotive prospects—rather than the lean, flexible type of operation needed to serve the existing markets.

n the next month, I familiarized myself with the details of the operation, the politics of the organization, and the personnel pecking order. Holed up in my hotel room for a week, I turned out more than a hundred hand-written pages describing what was wrong with the company and what remedial steps should be taken. I turned in the document to be typed.

Three weeks later the brass in New York called to demand that I give them something less radical. The Division Vice President wanted me to retract my “ridiculous” statements that virtually condemned the entire operation and prescribed starting over. If my paper were to see the light of day, he said, even if I were right, everyone—the manager, the engineers, the marketing and sales people, himself, his boss—would be at risk. I insisted I did what I was hired to do: write the truth as I saw it.

That Friday my check included severance pay. I knew I had to become my own master.

(Less than a year later, the Division Vice president and all his cohorts were fired. Eventually so was the president.)