New Captain, New Plans

As a young man, Vance D. Coffman would get up before dawn on winter mornings, mount the horse he bought for $150 in chore money and ride along the creek on his family’s farm, checking muskrat traps.

It’s tempting to write about the stars in the cold Iowa sky above him, and how those would one day draw the young man to the top of American industry. But Coffman himself would never put it that way.

Coffman, 53, is an unpretentious space engineer who doesn’t like to tell personal stories, write books or coin aphorisms. His burden is that he took over as chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corp. on Friday from a man who does all of those things.

Norman R. Augustine was a celebrity CEO--advisor to presidents, symbol of an industry, a Lee Iacocca with warheads. On the surface, Augustine’s successor might seem to be a pallid successor for such a monumental job. The head of Lockheed Martin will command about 230,000 employees--more than the Marine Corps and its reserves--and almost $40 billion a year in revenue.

As one of the nation’s top two builders of warplanes, missiles, space launchers, satellites and defense electronics, Coffman will be in a position to influence military policy and international relations. Along the way, he’ll have to figure out how to do something Augustine hasn’t accomplished: make the Bethesda, Md.-based colossus work, on a daily basis, over time.

Counting the pending $11.6-billion purchase of Northrop Grumman Corp., he will preside over a transition that will see 22 formerly separate companies learning to live as one--a hard task, but one for which the studious Coffman seems ideally suited.

“If Vance doesn’t thrive [leading] this corporation, it’s because they’ve gotten too big too fast and maybe no one could do it,” said Val P. Peline, former president of the Lockheed space division.

Onlookers from Wall Street, Washington and the media have to take such sentiments on faith.

Coffman rose out of virtual darkness; he can’t even talk about 20 of his 30 years at Lockheed, having spent them on top-secret satellite missions at the company’s space and missiles division in Sunnyvale, Calif.

All that professional secrecy combined with a Midwestern farm boy’s natural disdain for blabbing makes Coffman a challenge to interview.

How did he rise from the obscurity of secret programs to corporate prominence?

“Lucky,” he said.

End of answer.

What has the transition from Augustine’s leadership been like? “I’d say it was exciting.”

When Coffman lets himself speak, he seems to wrestle with expressing several layers of thought at once.

For instance, he said he could summarize the company’s operating slogan “pretty succinctly,” and then mounted a meticulous discourse that touched on the stages of a contract and even the relative life cycles of airplanes, satellites and launch vehicles.

The slogan itself is a pretty succinct two words: “Mission Success.”

But that’s the public Coffman.

Associates say that’s only part of the picture, that Coffman is an ambitious man who learns by listening to others and who earns loyalty with his deep, unshakable foundations.

“The theme for any story on Vance has gotta be he had solid, Middle America roots, and he went out and got himself educated, and his intellect allowed him to succeed. And he never lost his roots,” Peline said.

Coffman was born in 1944 in Kinross, Iowa, a village of grain and dairy farmers that today has 89 residents, a post office and two churches.

The family moved across the state in 1949 to Winthrop--a bustling 600 souls--where his father bought land to raise soybeans, grain and corn. Coffman said he learned discipline early in life, rising to do chores at 6 a.m. and doing them again every evening at 5. He helped a neighbor with cattle, saving money to buy his first horse.

That, too, taught him lessons--including what may be as close as he can get to an Augustine-style aphorism: “If you have a horse that you’d like to ride in the summer, you have to take care of it in the wintertime as well.”

Coffman only rides a couple of times a year now, with one of his two daughters. While he may look more like a desk jockey in photographs--aviator glasses, wide forehead, sober smile--he remains an expert horseman, regularly winning rodeos staged by an elite group of aerospace executives who go on a Western retreat every year.

But the rustic life was never Coffman’s aim. His father studied chemical engineering but left college halfway through to buy a farm. “In hindsight, I think he felt that there were lots of ways to make a living that were different than being on a farm,” Coffman said.

Coffman and his three brothers--one older, two younger--all ended up studying science and engineering at Iowa State University.

It was space that caught Coffman’s interest. He grew up during the U.S.-Soviet race to land an astronaut on the moon, and remembers being captivated by Sputnik, though he casts the memory in typically unromantic terms.

“I was curious about the implications,” he said. “I was curious what good could come from the high vantage point that space brought.”

Coffman graduated third in his class of 45 at East Buchanan High School and enrolled at Iowa State in 1962 to study aerospace engineering. While fellow students spent vacations flipping burgers and memorizing Beatles lyrics, Coffman went to Edwards Air Force Base in the summer of 1965 to help with the X-15 rocket plane program.

When he graduated in 1967, the cash-strapped Coffman cast a practical eye at the job market. He wanted a way to keep going to school, and Lockheed had a program that offered to pay for graduate studies at Stanford University.

Hugh Dougherty was Coffman’s first supervisor at Lockheed, and he said the Iowa boy stood out almost right away.

“Vance was always interested in getting ahead. That’s not negative, that’s positive. He was a very focused person,” Dougherty recalled.

Coffman entered the Stanford graduate program in 1971 in pursuit of a doctorate in astronautics. His days taken up by work and school, Coffman had no time for the social turbulence of the era. He remembers stepping over student protesters to get to class.

Again, his pragmatism helped him. “He probably was the most efficient at converting his work at Lockheed into his doctorate thesis over at Stanford,” said Dougherty, now a manager at Lockheed Martin’s labs in Palo Alto.

Coffman eventually produced a breakthrough that continues to contribute to satellite programs today: a way to take sightings from stars to correct for drift in the gyroscopes that keep satellites aligned. The Hubble Space Telescope relies partly on Coffman’s work.

Coffman had gone to Stanford thinking he wanted to be a manager. It was, as usual, a rationally considered decision. “We had perhaps more people [who] were technically competent than we had [in the] talent pool to be the managers,” he said. “You ought to take advantage of opportunities you’re interested in.”

Val Peline, who outranked both Dougherty and Coffman in those days, said Coffman had a natural call to lead. Coffman inspired confidence through his steadiness, intellect, decisiveness and disarming openness of spirit.

“Vance was also a poet,” Dougherty said. “He had the ability to capture his ideas in poetry with the guys.”

After one particularly challenging classified satellite project, the engineers held a ceremony to mark completion, and Coffman surprised his co-workers by reading a poem celebrating what they had done.

“The grapevine was saying, ‘Here’s a really attractive young man who has technical skills, management skills and people skills,’ ” said Daniel Tellep, who was pretty much as big a wig as Coffman could have hoped to impress. Tellep became president of Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in 1984 and chairman and CEO of Lockheed Corp. in 1989.

A decade out of Stanford, Coffman was named president of the Space Systems Division in 1988. Tellep grew to trust Coffman as one of his top advisors.

So how did Coffman manage to hit it off so well with Tellep? “He was obviously the man making the decisions, and I was somebody trying to get information in front of him to help do that. I think over time he thought he was getting usable if not valuable input, so it worked out,” Coffman said.

“That is understated indeed,” Tellep said when told of Coffman’s explanation. Tellep, retired as the first CEO of Lockheed Martin and living in California, said he came to consider Coffman as his successor at pre-merger Lockheed because of a rare mix of qualities.

“People use the word ‘guileless’ for Vance, and that is not a bad description,” Tellep said. “His self-interest is deeply subordinated to what is right for the program or right for the company.”

Tellep saw a man who absorbed information to a prodigious degree, he said. That meant genuinelyseeking the thoughts of others, and it meant taking copious notes in meetings, even on topics outside his field, when others had long since disconnected, Tellep said.

“He listens to inputs, sorts through information and makes a decision. Then he has four very effective words that he uses ultimately. Those words are, ‘I want you to,’ followed by what he wants you to do. They signify that he’s made up his mind, but it’s not done in an overbearing way. It’s just a very clear sense of direction,” Tellep said.

Those qualities enabled Coffman to handle several unpleasant tasks.

He presided over a painful reorganization of the space division after the end of the Cold War, overseeing several consolidations that required layoffs.

He played a similar role after Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged in 1995, shutting operations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to consolidate them in Sunnyvale.

“In the Lockheed Martin [merger], he had the hardest part of it and did a magnificent job of it,” Augustine said.

In the five years Augustine has known Coffman--the last year or so as next-door office neighbors--he has come to trust him much as Tellep did.

“I can’t think of anybody any more than Vance, that if you had something that your life depended on and you had to turn it over to somebody, he’d be that kind of person,” Augustine said.

After the Lockheed-Martin merger, though, there was no plan to turn the company over to Coffman, Augustine said. The board of directors tackled the succession question last year. Because of all the talent acquired in merging 22 companies into one, he said, “there were several very good candidates to run this company.”

In the end, the board voted unanimously for Coffman, naming him president and chief operating officer last July, with an annual compensation package of about $1.6 million. In Coffman’s favor, Augustine said, were his broad experience, skills that seemed to complement those of other executives and his performance on the tough consolidation jobs.

“And I guess it’s just that intangible, too,” Augustine said. “We just have an awful lot of faith in him.”

Walking into his office, which sports the requisite models of jet fighters and spacecraft, Coffman parts his personal veil just a micron: “You want to see the definition of a generation change in technology?” he said, gesturing to a photograph on one wall.

It’s not a satellite. It’s a shot Coffman took of a tractor pulling a cultivator on his late father-in-law’s farm. In the background, if you look closely, is a team of horses working another field.