The Air Apparent

If crusty Olive Ann Beech, 69-year-old head of Wichita's Beech Aircraft Corp., is queen of the private-plane industry, her nephew Frank Hedrick is crown prince; since 1968 he has been Beech president. The division of labor has worked well, piloting Beech from a $7.7 million loss in fiscal 1970 to a $7,000,000 profit the next year. Now the family management team has begun merger negotiations with troubled Grumman Aircraft, which lost $70 million in 1972 mostly because of cost overruns on the Navy's F-14 Tomcat fighter plane. Grumman officials contend that those troubles are now well behind them and that a merger between Beech and Grumman could provide a tremendous boost for both companies by mating Grumman's strength in research and development (it built lunar modules for the Apollo space program) with Beech's expertise in general aircraft marketing. Hedrick, 63, will surely be a major force in the new company.

The merger would provide Hedrick another opportunity to test his unorthodox management theories. Unlike most corporate executives, he operates without specific goals in mind, preferring to concentrate on what he calls "constant aims," which amounts to doing "any job assigned to you better than the job has been done before." That is only one of his store of Dale Carnegie-ish homilies (another: "Don't forget to do today's chores or you won't be around tomorrow"). A bachelor until age 40, Hedrick is known for his love of golf and political conservatism. Strangely enough, neither he nor his aunt has learned to fly an airplane.

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