Mellor

"He believed in the naval succession model in which retiring captains avoid returning to their ships so as not to interfere with their successor’s authority, and proudly told me that he had spoken only once to Mellor’s successor, Nick Chabraja, since 1997."

"They found duplicate pieces of expensive and underutilized machinery in adjacent tank plants—Mellor combined the facilities. More generally, they discovered that plant managers carried far too much inventory and hadn’t been calculating return on investment in their requests for additional capital."

"The Anders years (only three in total) can be divided into two basic phases: the generating of cash and its deployment. In each phase, the company’s approach was highly idiosyncratic. Let’s start with cash generation. When Anders and Mellor began to implement their plan, General Dynamics was overleveraged and had negative cash flow. Over the ensuing three years, the company would generate $5 billion of cash. There were two basic sources of this astonishing influx: a remarkable tightening of operations and the sale of businesses deemed noncore by Anders’s strategic framework."

"Which brings us to the other larger-than-expected source of cash at the company: asset sales. While Mellor was wringing excess cash from the operations, Anders set out to divest noncore businesses and grow his largest business units through acquisition. Interestingly, as Anders met with his industry peers, he found that, as a group, they were more interested in buying than selling. He also found that they were often willing to pay premium prices. The result was a dramatic shrinking of the company through a series of highly accretive divestitures."