The Making of the Presidents

"The strength of our country is in direct relationship to the strength and skills of the men running its corporations." So says Manhattan's Sidney M. Boyden, 67, who manufactures nothing, markets nothing, manages a staff that is smaller (30 associates) than the average Boy Scout troop. As founder and president of Boyden Associates, Inc., he has supplied more big businesses with top managers than any other U.S. executive recruiter.

The oldest (21 years) and by far the largest (annual billings: close to $5,000,000) firm in the trade, Boyden Associates is no body-snatching agency dealing in everything from young business-school grads on the make or passed-over veterans. It concentrates on turning up what Boyden calls "the most complicated product there is--men to run large corporations."

Top Titles. Boyden finds and places some 200 high-level managers a year--all at salaries above $25,000 annually. Currently, there are enough Boyden enlistees roaming U.S. executive suites to staff the private sector of a middle-sized nation. Among the top ones to whom Boyden points: Presidents Virgil Boyd of Chrysler, Arthur Larkin Jr. of General Foods, Stuart Silloway of Investors Diversified Services, John L. Gushman of Anchor Hocking Glass; Chairman A. King McCord of Westinghouse Air Brake; Presidents and Chairmen Harold S. Geneen of ITT, Robert O. Fickes of Philco-Ford.

Boyden got his first broad look at the management market in 1941, when he left a 16-year career as Montgomery Ward's personnel director to join Booz, Allen & Hamilton, one of the nation's biggest management-consulting firms (annual billings: $40 million including scientific, technical and design services). There Boyden soon learned that top men were hard to find in the war-thinned ranks of many corporations. The market for a recruiter of talented executives seemed limitless, so in 1946 Boyden set up his own shop.

Search & Employ. Companies that turn to Boyden pay a monthly fee that can run well into the thousands, depending on the importance of the job. Generally, Boyden's highly polished search-and-employ tactics turn up a prime prospect or two within 60 days. The firm maintains dossiers on 50,000 in-harness executives, runs 13 worldwide offices (eight in the U.S., five abroad) that watch corporate activity, screen candidates for specific clients.

Boyden's prospects are rarely aware that Boyden is aware of them as potential job hoppers. Former Studebaker President Sherwood Harry Egbert entered the dossier files years ago when McCulloch Corp., of which he was then executive vice president, commissioned Boyden's firm for a recruiting job. His own number came up in 1960, when Studebaker asked Boyden for a new president. More recently, there was Gillette's ex-President Stuart Hensley, who had been a contented company man for more than two decades until this year, when Boyden 1) sold Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co. on Hensley's presidential potential, and 2) sold Hensley on Warner-Lambert with the argument that the fast-growing merchandiser (ethical drugs, Listerine, Rolaids, etc.) offered "a more challenging situation" than Gillette.

Boyden, too, is after challenging situations. Abroad, the firm is chipping away at the fusty once-with-a-company, always-with-a-company notion of European executives. One Boyden man has been prospecting a relatively untapped resource: overseas-based U.S. managers who would not dream of returning to the rat race back home, yet might be good candidates for foreign subsidiaries of other U.S. companies.

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