No Ego, Just Self-Confidence

Senior executives of Textron Inc. still shudder to remember the ride that Bill Miller, then company chairman, took them on last October. After visiting buyers of Textron rolling mills in Yugoslavia and Poland, they were supposed to fly to Vienna, but their plane was grounded by fog. So Miller herded them aboard a bus for a 14-hour trip through Czechoslovakia. The roads were rough and visibility near zero, but Miller, sitting beside the driver, issued a steady stream of instructions about how to steer through tight turns. Periodically, he had the bus stopped so that he could loosen up with calisthenics, and everybody else could get over the shakes.

The ride was symbolic of the task that now faces Miller.

His formal training for determining how much money the economy needs about equals his knowledge of Czech roads. But he speaks with an assurance that might seem like egotism --if it were not for all those stories around Textron of Miller riding the bus to work, lunching at his desk on soup and crackers and occasionally doing a job himself that a subordinate should have done. Instead, Miller combines a casual openness with almost supreme self-confidence. Says Textron Senior Vice President John B. Henderson: "It does not occur to him that there is anything he cannot do."

Miller began developing that blend early. When he was an infant, his storekeeper father moved the family from Bill's birthplace of Sapulpa, Okla., to Borger, a Texas Panhandle town so new that it had no jail; prisoners were chained to a log. Says Miller: "It was a life of Depression, Dust Bowl and frontier. But that environment creates strong individuals."

An older brother set an example of success by going to Annapolis. But, uncertain whether he would be accepted into the Naval Academy, Miller borrowed a car, drove to Santa Fe and took the exam for the Coast Guard Academy. He passed, and at 17 found himself training aboard a Danish sailing ship out of New London, Conn. The discipline, he says, "was awfully healthy," and he began "to understand the techniques of making an organization work." Graduating in 1945, he got to Japan just after the war ended. A year later, at 20, he was given command of a landing craft, with a crew of 30, to bring through the Panama Canal to Galveston and mothballing.

Then the Coast Guard sent him to Shanghai, where Miller saw a society that was crumbling, in part because of runaway inflation; the rate of price increases that summer of 1946 hit 2,000%.* He also met Ariadna Rogajarski, a White Russian who had been born in Manchuria and had been living in Shanghai under the Japanese occupation. They married, and the young officer--who is still addressed as George by old friends--began calling himself G. William Miller. His bride found Bill much easier to pronounce than George.

In 1949, Miller entered the University of California law school on the G.I. Bill, while Ariadna worked as a bookkeeper. He recalls his early days in law school as the most frightening of his life: "The first few months I didn't understand what they were talking about. I carried a dictionary around to class." That was good training for a Federal Reserve chairman who must now master an equally abstruse financial jargon of lagged reserves, reverse repos and disintermediation. Miller got top marks, became editor of the law review and joined the Wall Street firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore on graduation in 1953. There he bagged a prize assignment: unraveling the legal complexities created by Financier Royal Little's drive to turn Textron from a textile company into one of the first conglomerates. Little offered him a job. His confidence now in full flower, Miller suggested a deal: make me a vice president in one year, or fire me. Recalls Little: "That proposal delighted me."

Textron was then growing in all directions, gobbling up other firms at the rate of one every 60 days, and there were few formal lines of authority. Miller made his vice presidency on schedule at the age of 32 and worked closely with Little on the acquisitions. The most important was Bell Aircraft's helicopter business. Little remembers being so frustrated by Bell executives changing their minds about the sale every day that he told Miller: "Bill, you have got to handle these people, because I'm going to tell them to go to hell." Miller patiently negotiated what turned out to be Textron's most brilliant acquisition. Helicopter sales boomed with the Viet Nam War and now account for 29% of Textron's business.

At the age of 35 in 1960, Miller became president, and at 43, chief executive. He had to convert Textron's diverse businesses into a coherent organization. So he demanded plans from divisions that had been going their own merry way. Says Senior Vice President Henderson: "If Miller thought a plan was sloppy, nothing would make him go ahead--rising costs, deadlines, nothing. Bill would say, 'Back!' " Under Miller's guidance, Textron's sales grew from $383 million a year in 1960 to $2.8 billion last year, and profits jumped from $14 million to $137 million.

At Textron, Miller also recruited blacks for management jobs, headed just about every fund-raising campaign in Rhode Island and fully developed his blend of intensity and concern for people. He crammed his calendar with appointments that he somehow met, showed up at the office at 7:30 a.m., worked six days a week and took home a bulging briefcase. When he decided to learn Russian, Ariadna recalls, she prepared tapes that he listened to on summer drives between their home in Providence and their vacation cottage in Westport, Mass.

But associates say that he never made a subordinate work after 7 p.m. He insisted that the company's 43 highest executives take fully paid three-month sabbaticals every five years, just to recharge themselves. Miller spent one sabbatical building shelves in his garage. Senior Vice President J. Joseph Kruse is convinced that Miller pushed himself to practice squash and golf (his handicap is 17) primarily to spare associates the embarrassment of putting up with an inferior player who happened to be the boss. Kruse, who often golfed with Miller for $1 a hole, was mildly annoyed by his insistence on playing out a hole that he had no chance of winning--and impressed by Miller's refusal to talk later about the game. Miller, says Kruse, takes defeat hard, but when he is angry he merely becomes very quiet.

In his new job, Miller is somewhat too quiet to suit Ariadna. The childless Millers are an exceptionally close couple, and spend many hours together listening to classical music and reading, mostly books of history and geography. But Ariadna has one complaint about her husband's work: Bill no longer unburdens himself by talking about the details of his job at home. So, just to keep up, she attends all the many congressional hearings at which he testifies.

*W. Michael Blumenthal, now Treasury Secretary, was then picking up odd jobs in Shanghai as the son of expatriate Germans. The two did not meet until much later in the U.S., but they relish trading reminiscences about the China of their youth.

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