Bradshaw: Man Who Reshaped Industry Giants

There’s not much stirring these days in the four top floors of the majestic RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, where a bustling corps of executives used to run one of the country’s most important conglomerates.

The old RCA board room, the site of weighty deliberations for decades, is dark and locked. All other offices are bare, except for one occupied by a man in a bow tie who cheerfully acknowledges that he had a lot to do with the emptiness around him.

“When we sold the company, General Electric started cutting overhead, and pretty soon they had cleaned this place out,” Thornton F. Bradshaw, the former RCA chairman and chief executive, said mildly. “The cutbacks were needed, but sometimes it does seem odd being here.”

Bradshaw, 69, presided over a dramatic turnaround at RCA between 1981 and 1985 and then announced in December, 1985, that the company would be sold to GE. During his earlier, 17-year tenure as president of Atlantic Richfield Co., he earned himself a place in business school textbooks for his low-key style, his use of modern management techniques and his advocacy of causes that he felt were in the public interest.

His espousal of some of those causes--including mass transit and repeal of the oil depletion allowance--also made him a controversial figure with some of his oil industry peers.

These days, the one-time Harvard professor consults for GE, chairs the MacArthur Foundation, sits on five corporate boards and heads several journalistic and educational organizations. He spends time, too, reflecting on his own career and the industries he has worked in.

“I don’t know that I’m any closer to the answers to these deep questions, but I do have a little more time to reflect,” said Bradshaw, who shuttles between his New York home, a Martha’s Vineyard retreat and Southern California, where three of his children live.

Over Bradshaw’s desk hangs a framed cartoon that New Yorker magazine artist Charles Addams conceived from the longtime RCA logo, “His Master’s Voice,” which depicted a fox terrier listening to a Victrola. In the Addams drawing, nine RCA terriers are seated around RCA’s corporate board room table, listening attentively to the gramophone at the board chairman’s place.

RCA’s standing as an American institution made Bradshaw’s plans to sell the company not only his final act as chairman but his most controversial. Critics complained that the cash-rich, $9-billion-a-year company, which had pioneered radio and television and other electronics technologies, did not need to sell out to the even larger GE.

Some still maintain that the sale was not necessary, asserting that robust earnings from NBC and RCA’s aerospace operations would have kept the company profitable while it tried to salvage, or sell, its troubled units. Since the sale, these critics note, GE has sold off RCA’s records, carpet and insurance businesses, and some analysts predict that it may eventually shed its semiconductor and television manufacturing units.

(Former NBC President Grant Tinker, who voted for the deal as an RCA board member, doesn’t regret his decision but said that, with the benefit of hindsight, “it’s a tough call.”)

Bradshaw, however, stands by his view that the GE merger offered the best hope for preserving the jobs in RCA’s slow-growing businesses, including the import-threatened semiconductor and consumer electronics businesses. “In the ‘70s, NBC was milked for cash to keep the other businesses afloat, and it began to slip way behind in its capital investment,” he said. “And television is too risky a business for a whole corporation to rely on.”

General Electric will make the most of the questionable businesses, he said, “and if they can’t stand on their own two feet . . . they’ll make some moves to get rid of them.”

Promised Independence

At the time of the sale, Bradshaw also pledged that GE would leave NBC largely autonomous rather than make decisions that should be left to broadcasters.

Critics recalled those pledges in the past year as Robert C. Wright, the former GE executive who is now NBC president, discussed plans to cut the network’s budget and, briefly, tried to pressure NBC employees to contribute to a political action committee. (NBC is “controlled by industrialists, no matter what RCA executives said when they sold it,” said James I. Magid, principal at Magid Research in New York and a longtime RCA analyst.)

Bradshaw defends Wright as a “very good manager” and insists that NBC has remained largely independent. Wright’s concerns about holding down cost increases are justified, he said, in an era when the growth in TV advertising revenue has slowed sharply .

Observers attribute a good measure of Bradshaw’s success at RCA to his attraction of top talent, including Grant Tinker, who took NBC from a perennial third-place finisher to its current No. 1 status.

Bradshaw was enlisted for the chairman’s post by other RCA board members, who had installed and replaced three chief executives in the previous decade. Even before Bradshaw left Arco, he began worrying about who he would find to replace NBC President Fred Silverman, whose effectiveness in running the network was declining daily.

It was at a lunch in Arco’s executive dining room that Tinker agreed to take the NBC post, despite predictions from friends that he wouldn’t accept a position that required him to commute from California. Mild-mannered Bradshaw was intrigued by Tinker, who “wasn’t a brash type, like so many in the entertainment world.”

“I said, ‘I don’t want to waste your time. Is there any chance you’ll take this job?’ and he said, ‘Yes, there is a chance,’ ” Bradshaw remembers. “I was shocked.”

Bradshaw Persuasive

Tinker said he’s still shocked that he took the job. He cites Bradshaw’s persuasiveness as an example of his management style. “He’s a fooler,” Tinker said. “He never seems to sell hard or work hard, but he gets a hell of a lot done.”

Bradshaw, known at Arco as a delegator, gave Tinker a pledge that as chairman he would not interfere in programming decisions. Though NBC’s turnaround was not secured until Tinker’s third season, “he never picked up the phone to complain that it was taking a long time,” Tinker said.

The NBC turnaround helped lift RCA’s earnings to $369 million in 1985 from $41 million in 1981. The company’s stock price more than quadrupled in the period.

Bradshaw said the approach that Tinker developed at NBC should help the network in the difficult task of remaining the ratings leader. Tinker sought to slowly build a full schedule of solid shows rather than concentrate on a few big hits, in hopes of assembling a prime-time schedule strong enough to hold viewers throughout the evening.

“Even though Grant’s gone, that building-block approach should help them stay on top,” Bradshaw said.

While NBC News has remained relatively untouched by the cost cutting that has taken hold at CBS and ABC, Bradshaw believes that the news operation ultimately will make staff cuts, too, as it adapts to the new needs of local affiliates. In the new era, the local stations will provide news headlines, and the networks will provide analysis, “so they won’t need all those 60-odd foreign bureaus they have,” he said. “There’s no reason that all three (networks) need to have people sitting around in Zimbabwe.”

Raised in New York, Bradshaw attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, where he received a bachelor’s degree and an MBA. He taught at Harvard, spent time in the Navy and at Cresap, McCormick & Paget, a management consulting firm, and in 1956 joined Atlantic Refining Co., Arco’s predecessor.

Arco Chairman Robert O. Anderson made him president of the company in 1964.

Bradshaw could play rough when provoked. When Bendix Corp. began a takeover play for RCA in 1982, Bradshaw declared in a statement that Bendix Chairman William M. Agee had “not demonstrated the ability to manage his own affairs, let alone someone else’s.” The comment referred to Agee’s relationship with Mary Cunningham, the former aide who became Agee’s wife after a messy corporate-suite romance.

But Bradshaw made his reputation as a calming influence, who restored tranquillity at RCA after years of corporate intrigue. During the 1970s, when the oil industry was under sharpest attack from environmentalists, Bradshaw and Anderson burnished Arco’s public image with a variety of public-spirited projects and philanthropy.

The company developed a car-pooling program used by 60% of Arco employees during the mid-1970s.

Arco showered its corporate beneficence not only on hospitals, universities and museums but on its sometime adversaries in the environmental movement. The Arco Foundation gave a $1-million donation to the Nature Conservancy so the group could purchase Santa Cruz Island and make it a wildlife preserve.

In an internal Arco memo in 1980, Bradshaw wrote that while the basic goals of private enterprise are to turn out needed products and earn a fair return, “the new dimension for business . . . is social approval. Without it, economic victory would be Pyrrhic indeed.”

Bradshaw also debated his colleagues in the oil industry by arguing that they should give up the oil depletion allowance in return for decontrol of oil prices. “Brad was willing to publicly defend a position that to many of his oil industry colleagues seemed unthinkable,” said William F. Kieschnick Jr., who succeeded Bradshaw as Arco’s president and chief operating officer before retiring a year ago.

In recent years, Bradshaw, still an Arco board member, has watched Arco’s corporate giving decline as oil prices forced a sharp corporate retrenchment. In the past six years, Arco’s payroll has dwindled to 28,000 from 50,000; in the same period, the Arco Foundation’s budget has been cut to about $8 million from $75 million.

Bradshaw supported the charity cutback as “essential” for Arco’s well-being but said he’s concerned that it came just as the federal government was reducing its support of such social and charitable causes. He supports sharp cutbacks in defense spending and increased federal efforts to help Americans in areas suffering from the decline of manufacturing businesses.

Bradshaw said he has every confidence in his former colleagues at Arco, which has sold off a grab bag of slower-growing business and will begin to prosper when oil prices start to rise sharply, as he believes they will within the next five years. “With demand increasing and no change in supply, that’s inevitable,” he said.

Because the rise is inevitable, he favors a gasoline tax of perhaps 25 cents a gallon to foster conservation and pay for further research into alternate energy sources, including solar and fusion energy. He also favors long-range energy planning by the federal government--an idea that raised the hackles of his oil industry peers when he delivered speeches and wrote editorials on it in the 1970s.

“Someone has to ensure the country has a long-term energy supply, and industry is not doing it,” he said.