the company went on its acquisition binge, acquiring everything from other aerospace companies to metals concerns to WaterPik.
But in the mid-1980s, after conglomerates had fallen out of favor on Wall Street and after Teledyne’s stock began slumping, Singleton turned around and began working on slimming down the company. He and his successor as chief executive, George Roberts, eventually spun off two insurance companies, Unitrin Inc. and Argonaut Group.
Singleton then increasingly yielded management control of the company, and finally relinquished the title of chairman in 1991. He continued, however, to keep a close eye on the company as its dominant shareholder.
Meanwhile, the company’s problems mounted as it was investigated for a range of crimes in its defense business. Teledyne settled charges that it submitted inflated bills to the government, and it also pleaded guilty to falsifying tests on electronic components.
Then, in the mid-1990s, Teledyne found itself in the unaccustomed role of corporate prey--it was the target of a hostile takeover attempt by WHX Corp., parent of Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. Singleton responded by lining up a deal with a friendly buyer, Allegheny-Ludlum, and a new company was formed, Allegheny-Teledyne.
Singleton was born in 1916 in Haslet, Texas, on a ranch where his father raised cotton and cattle. He attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and later went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he majored in electrical engineering and earned his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate.
In 1951, a year after finishing his studies at MIT, Singleton moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for Hughes Aircraft, North American Aviation and then Litton Industries, before launching Teledyne.
After stepping down from active management of Teledyne, he pursued diverse interests, including cattle ranching in California and New Mexico. He also was a student of Western folklore and the Pueblo Indian culture, a wine collector and a chess and poetry enthusiast.
Singleton served on various boards, including those of Caltech, Apple Computer and Union Bank.
He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Caroline, and by five children and four grandchildren.
Gordon said, “George Kozmetsky had a more significant impact on my life than Henry. He taught me to work hard and work long. He had a reputation of being the man who made his first million at a dollar an hour. J. Paul Getty said the way to get rich was to get up early, work hard and strike oil. Luck helps, but it is not enough. I always liked what Lee Trevino said: ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’”
“George Kozmetsky always stressed the value of working hard and was a living example. He showed me how important it was to really care about other people and learn their lives and try to help them. He helped me to figure out how to measure success on an incremental, consistent basis to quantify abstract goals into dollars by determining the failure rate of a product and evaluating that in terms of the cost, including opportunity and indirect as well as direct cost.”
“He taught me that enthusiasm is essential, and to throw out lots of ideas while realizing that many will be unusable.”
“I learned that when things get bogged down because of indecision…force a decision, even if it creates a crisis, by selecting one of the alternatives as a straw man, but making it clear to others that the matter is open to objections.”
“I also learned that no job is too small, and sweeping a floor when it’s needed shows others that a willingness to do menial work is not above anyone.”
“I learned to do nothing illegal and not to cheat anyone, nor to squander resources.”
“I learned the discipline to make crucial decisions using scientific methods and melding that into a long-term vision to attain goals.”
“I learned to use Moore’s law, the learning curve and price elasticity to set competitive prices and to get the contract at any cost and figure a way to add more bells and whistles to the product and make it profitable.”
“I learned the value of worrying about your customer’s career and of making your customer’s problems your problems as soon as possible, and to deliver lousy news immediately and talk to your customers early in the morning before they get tired or distracted.”
“Converting cash to other resources is very important. People, processes, market position, products and property should be the standard order of resource importance. People’s value on a project changes as the project evolves. Move people off a project where they are no longer suited to the task by getting them excited about a new opportunity.”
“I learned a lot from George.”
Graves’s first project at Teledyne was to write a proposal for an air-to-air radar test station for Rockwell International. Teledyne won the job, and Graves designed, built and delivered the product. It comprised using an analog computer that generated a differential equation-based function. Graves used operational amplifiers, which required 200-volt power supplies that shocked him a few times during the checkout phase of the prototype; despite this, it worked well.
Graves’s Interaction with Dr. Henry Singleton, Teledyne
“When I first went to work at Teledyne, we were all in the old Amelco building, and all the engineers were in one large room. Singleton came by my desk and asked what I was doing. I was trying to design a sin/cosine computer using two vacuum-tube amplifiers with capacitor feedback so that the output of each amplifier was the integral of the input. I was then looping the output of each amplifier back to the input of the other. This created a cyclical sin-wave function. Henry was fascinated by the idea but pointed out that temperature required stringent and tight control because of the capacitor’s high sensitivity to temperature and the possibility of the function drifting off.
“About two months later, Henry called me into his office for a meeting with a young semiconductor engineer who worked for us. We then proceeded to invent the computer that went on most of the helicopters used in Vietnam while sitting there in his office. He would ask us if we understood different things. I would jump in and answer everything he asked. He eventually said, ‘Shut up, Gordon, I know you know the answer. I want to see if he knows the answer.’ The design we came up with used microcircuit flip flops and switches to perform the tasks I had been trying to accomplish with vacuum-tube amplifiers. Taking the value in a register of flip flops (V) and adding that value to another register (B) at some fixed-rate (dt) gave a solution B = the integral of Vdt.
“A few years later, shortly after field-effect transistors came out, Henry came into my office and asked what I was doing. I told him I was trying to figure out how they worked. He said he was interested in that, and sat down. We figured out that it was akin to a vacuum-tube diode except that the blocking accumulation of electrons was in the metal at the junction of the metal with the silicon rather than in the vacuum of a tube. Henry later ended up making most of Teledyne’s semiconductor computer elements out of field-effect transistors.”
It was during this time that Graves learned how to complete a project on time. A good project manager, Graves reasoned, should first identify all the major tasks required to achieve a result and make sure someone accepts the responsibility of accomplishing those assigned tasks, completing them on time and within budget, and then make sure everyone is meeting their goals. The most important job of a project manager is to help people understand that barriers should not become excuses. Graves felt that project management was the best possible work experience for learning how to run a company.
