GEC

"Each business then had to be introduced to the routine of annual budget meetings and monthly reporting which was to be the managing director’s key tool of control. The system was simple, appropriate to Weinstock’s small-business background, the lack of financial sophistication among GEC’s managers, his horror of bureaucracy and the wide spread of businesses within the GEC group. Weinstock wanted managers to make their own decisions and to stand or fall by them. Responsibility for results meant an end to the usual rosy forecasts. Every manager now knew that if he failed to meet his budget, he would be in trouble, and possibly out on his ear."

"In his later life as a captain of industry, Arnold Weinstock would keep track of what was happening in GEC’s dozens of constituent companies by means of a series of accounting and financial ratios. Accurate cost-accounting was at the core of the discipline he would bring to the British electrical and defence contracting industries. His admiration for the power of accounting had been nurtured at the Stoke Newington Central School."

"The solution was provided by Sir Harry Moore of the small merchant bank Philip Hill, Higginson (subsequently part of Hill Samuel, which was behind many of the aggressive takeovers of the 1980s). Moore had acted for Radio & Allied in its abortive attempt to buy , Ekco and in its recent talks with EMI and others. Now he took Arnold Weinstock and Kenneth Bond to see GEC."

"Weinstock is a very private figure, and little light has ever been shed on how he reached the top of British industry, why he remained there, and what motivated him. Our first step was to approach him to seek his cooperation, although there was never any intention that this should be an ‘authorised’ biography. His response was polite but firm: he would do nothing to stand in our way, but while he remained managing director of GEC, that was his priority. He was not prepared to spend company time talking to us, even though he was keen to give a wider airing to his views on industrial policy and the mess which governments had made of it."

"What Weinstock, Lewis and Bond wanted most of all was accountability — for every manager to know exactly what he was responsible for. There were no more fat consultancy fees from GEC. Weinstock and Bond spread their message of control and accountability through the empire. Amorphous divisions were broken up into distinct units with specific products so that individuals could be given clear responsibility for smaller operations. ‘The first thing we did was to make sure that each business ran a product, with its own managing director totally responsible for everything,’ recalled Kenneth Bond. ‘He didn’t have to buy anything in. There were no alibis. If something wasn’t right it was clearly the responsibility of the person in charge. He couldn’t blame someone else.’’"

"se). The balance of sales shows that GEC was dominated by light electrical products. Weinstock was intent on increasing this emphasis, and he quickly began pursuing this central strategy, seeking to reduce GEC’s involvement in heavy engineering, where there were few orders and it was therefore difficult to make profits. This was a natural direction for Weinstock, given his own background in radio and television manufacture, but it was also driven by the overcapacity at the heavy end of the industry and the likelihood of continued growth in demand for consumer appliances."

"Weinstock was appalled by the mess he discovered at GEC, which opened his eyes to the way that big business was run. The top directors seemed to do little other than attend board meetings, spend a couple of weeks writing the minutes and then another couple of weeks preparing papers for the next one. ‘Even then the minutes bore little resemblance to what went on,’ Weinstock remembered. Worst of all, there were no proper figures."