As president of California's Ampex Corp., William E. Roberts, 49, has talked softly but swung a sharp ax. Called in three years ago to reshape the overexpanded manufacturer of recording equipment, he slashed away at excess executives and profitless products, pulled together Ampex's loose divisions under his own strong central control. Last week, having brought the company back from a $3,900,000 loss in 1960 to a $5,000,000 profit in 1963, Bill Roberts felt strong enough to expand: in a stock swap, Ampex took over Mandrel Industries Inc., a maker of complicated equipment for finding oil, which grossed $21 million last year. No scientist himself, Roberts was forced by the Depression to leave Illinois' Lake Forest College, made his way up to executive vice-president at Bell & Howell before joining Ampex. Though he is a business generalist, he has high regard for specialists. Even in Ampex's lean years, he expanded its technical staff, saw the investment pay off when the company turned out 24 new products last year.

A WORD of advice from his father, who was editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, convinced Thomas Church Dillon to give up his boyhood ambition of becoming a newspaperman. Said Dad: "When a publisher decides to economize, he looks at his reporters as the guys who spend the money, and at his advertising men as the guys who make the money. Now, who do you think he fires?" Dillon became an ad man. Leaving Harvard in 1936 without graduating, he joined Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, now the world's fourth largest agency (1963 billings: $248 million). Last week, at 48, Dillon became B.B.D.O.'s president and heir apparent to Chairman Charles Brower, 62. Like the more flamboyant Brower, Dillon is a copywriter, has concocted such forgettable slogans as the Northern Pacific Railway's "Main Street of the Northwest" and "Standard [Oil] takes better care of your car." Advertising can be automated, Dillon believes; B.B.D.O. will soon launch a system that--by feeding complicated market-testing results into a computer--is hopefully expected to lower the 90% failure rate of new products.

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