A Voice of Experience: An Interview with TRW's Frederick C. Crawford.

To Frederick C. Crawford, management is "a commonsense affair" with only two fundamentals: "follow the golden rule and invest in communications." Now 100 years old, Crawford has witnessed a steady parade of management transformations and has held positions at both ends of the American corporate spectrum. He began his career as a laborer at Steel Products Company in 1916 and retired as chairman of the board of TRW in 1958. In between, he worked at. all levels of Thompson Products--the company that Steel Products became and that later merged with Ramo-Wooldridge to become TRW--and worked closely with some of the greatest names of American business, including Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan. The lessons he learned from his many years in business are directly applicable to the workplace today. Then and now, says Crawford, "it's still a matter of providing products and services that are superior to the competition's and providing them cheaper and more efficiently." Doing that, Crawford says, comes down to "getting above-average effort from people over the long run." In his career, Crawford helped to define an approach to human resources that made first Thompson Products and then TRW famous. Well before anyone had coined the terms "empowerment" or "human capital," Crawford believed in open communication with workers; at mass meetings held every 60 days, he would talk directly to 5,000 people at one time. Says Crawford, "The best thing you can do with your employees is to tell them everything." Looking back, Crawford says this about his approach to management: "Common sense and decency are the keys to management.... I've come more and more to reach this conclusion, that there aren't a lot of rules to management." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]