Rockwell Successor Will Be Filling Shoes His Size

Rockwell International Corp. is getting a new chief executive, but employees, customers and investors may have trouble noticing much of a difference.

Don H. Davis and the man he replaces Oct. 1, Donald R. Beall, are as similar as peas in a pod both personally and professionally, say those who know them.

Davis, 57, of Newport Beach, and Beall, 58, of Corona del Mar, have engineering degrees and master’s degrees in business administration. Both rose quickly through the ranks and both play a lot of golf.

About the only difference, said Earl Washington, a corporate vice president, is that Davis is a little more personable, more likely to cajole and humor people.

“Beall is a much more intense individual,” he said. “Davis is intense, but has a more relaxed management style.”

But that doesn’t mean Davis won’t be pushing employees as hard as Beall does, Washington said. “Both are very competitive and want to excel,” he said.

Both are also committed to Rockwell’s new direction.

“I’ve been part of the management team for a long time,” Davis said Wednesday. “Come Oct. 1, there’s not going to be any great new revelation here.”

But Davis will face much different challenges than Beall, who led the transformation of Rockwell from an aerospace and defense firm to a commercial electronics, automation and semiconductor company.

Davis, who as president the last two years helped carry out the company’s transformation, now must build the company’s business lines in the U.S. and abroad.

He has traveled extensively to garner business in Europe and other areas of the world. He said the company will grow both internally and through acquisitions and that it will broaden its three lines of business: automation, semiconductors, and avionics and communications.

Wall Street isn’t worried about the changing of the guard.

“I like the idea of Rockwell replacing one first-stringer with another first-stringer,” said Howard A. Rubel, an industry analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. investment bankers in New York.

Davis spent most of his career at Allen-Bradley Co. in Milwaukee, a factory automation company he joined in 1963 as an engineering sales trainee. Rockwell bought it in 1985.

He was steadily promoted and, in 1979, took over its programmable controller division.

“Then it was a $30-million business and now it’s a $1-billion business,” Davis said. “I ran it for three years and got it going.”

When Rockwell bought Allen-Bradley, he became the automation division’s president, replacing Tracy O’Rourke, who became a Rockwell executive vice president. When O’Rourke left the company in 1990, Davis replaced him again.