Tales from Simon Ramo, the voice of experience in management
A corporate chairman accused of making illegal campaign contributions fires the board member who calls him out, inspiring a directors’ revolt.
An executive who promotes women in the corporate ranks is forced to reconsider when his wife starts acting jealous.
A brilliant idea man passed over for a promotion because of his physical deformity hatches a spectacular embezzlement scheme … and gets away with it.
These figures have the individuality and plausibility of characters drawn from real life, but they’re fictional characters in a new business text by Simon Ramo.
The term “legendary” has long since worn out its welcome in the entertainment and business arenas, but Ramo, 98, is one person it fits. A year ago, when I wrote about my first encounter with Ramo — he’s the co-founding “R” in TRW, the Southern California technology firm acquired by Northrop Grumman Corp. in 2002 — I touched on just a few of his accomplishments in business and civic service since he received his Caltech doctorate in 1936.
He was a pioneer in microwave research, in systems design and in the management of high-tech corporations, and served on the boards of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Atlantic Richfield Co. and Times Mirror Co., which owned The Times until 2000.
I count 18 books of which he was author, coauthor or editor, and I’ve probably missed a few; the subjects have ranged from high-level engineering to the inner game of tennis to the uses and abuses of technology.
I’ve met Ramo for lunch every few weeks over the last year. There’s never a dull moment or a lull in the conversation — no surprise to those who know him. We’ve covered everything from the use of robots in combat (he’s in favor) to the folly of sending humans to Mars and the dearth of political wisdom today.
A few months ago he shared with me his plans to publish two new books through USC’s Figueroa Press. They’re poised for release this month. One, titled “To Wit,” is a guide to the value, and pitfalls, of a sense of humor in management. As he boils down its theme: “Anyone in a leadership role will be handicapped in projecting influence if he or she is missing the humor gene.”
Those who are “observed as failing to comprehend what is laughable about a situation often will seem to be intellectually deficient.... Comedy happens.” On the other hand, he writes, not having the wit to know when you’re about to tell the wrong joke to the wrong audience can turn you into the second coming of Earl Butz.
The second book, “Tales From the Top,” grew out of a series of lectures on business management he delivered at Caltech and USC. To prepare, Ramo explains, he delved into the overstuffed bookshelf of tomes on management, only to discover that they covered well all aspects of running a company except the human dimension.
On that their advice was uniformly trite: “communicate clearly … motivate others … give praise when due.” On questions of integrity, judgment, avarice, immaturity, aging, prejudice, fear, they were silent.
Instead, Ramo compiled a sheaf of anecdotes from his own experience as a manager. He opened every lecture with one of these vignettes and placed them before his audience of students for discussion. James Ellis, dean of USC’s Marshall School of Business, soon started using them to drive discussion in his undergraduate course in leadership, and the book’s publication followed.
“If you have more than one employee, you’re going to have human behavior questions in management,” Ellis told me, explaining that he finds Ramo’s tales to be “as close as you can get to actually being on the firing line.” A veteran corporate CEO, Ellis said he was struck by the immediacy of the stories. “I’d read them and think: ‘This happened to me.’”
In conversation, Ramo’s style of expression is rigorously direct, and his tales from the top are no different. They deal with white-collar crime, corruption, gender politics, racism, conceit, deceit and self-delusion, without sugar-coating. The most instructive vignettes concern people in important positions making the wrong choices, but the nuanced presentations demonstrate that it’s not always easy to morally judge human beings for doing so.
While fictional, some of the anecdotes are “inspired by the adventures of real-life executives,” Ramo writes in his introduction. The first and last of the 10 anecdotes in this slender, pithy volume are perhaps the most complex. The closing tale concerns a company president who has been so determined to conceal that he is in fact black that when his wife gives birth to a dark-skinned child they secretly put her up for adoption. Now, 25 years later, the secret is about to come out, jeopardizing his own career as well as his wife’s appointment to the Cabinet.
Ramo touches on all the ways that politicians and business leaders circle around the true issues of character and competence that emerge when an ancient scandal gets masticated in public. Is the executive’s job threatened because he’s black? Because he lied? Because his personal life is in turmoil? Is he the racist in the story?
This is one of the anecdotes in the book that ends well for the protagonist — he takes a better job at an up-and-coming company, and his wife gets the Cabinet appointment. But it’s in the journey toward the happy ending that Ramo lays out all the equivocations and ambiguities of modern corporate management — rich food for thought for a business leadership class.
The opening anecdote focuses on a university president invited to join the board of the corporation headed by one of his institution’s leading benefactors and chairman of its board of trustees. Cast almost entirely as a dialogue between the university president and the company’s lawyer, it’s a thorough exploration of the multitude of conflicts of interest on corporate boards, as well as the emollient excuses with which business leaders rationalize them.
“You’re not familiar with the way things actually work in the corporate world,” the lawyer assures the inquisitive academic. No university president may be quite as naive about business as the hero of this story is made out to be, but the outcome of the conversation sounds right — the invitation to join the board is withdrawn.
That’s the hint of reality that all these tales from the top carry, straight from the experience of one who’s been there.
Michael Hiltzik’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.
