Personnel

Last week the following were news: P: Huge U. S. Steel Corp. has long struggled with what is probably the world's toughest management problem--how to run efficiently an industrial enterprise employing some 200,000 men and $1,800,000,000 in total assets. Last week in the august atmosphere of its headquarters at No. 71 Broadway, Manhattan, another move was made in the grand administration plans which Chairman Taylor hopes to complete before he turns the company over to Chairman-elect Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. next April. A new subsidiary, U. S. Steel Corp, of Delaware, was created solely as a management corporation. After the turn of the year, this corporation will be governed by a board of executives representing all phases of management in the operating units and headed by 47-year-old Benjamin Franklin Fairless, president-elect of the parent company. Headquarters of the new management corporation, which will determine all operating policy, will be in Pittsburgh, in harmony with "the atmosphere of steel operations." Thus Big Steel continues its announced program of rededicating Pittsburgh as the steel capital of the U. S. In the future only purely financial matters will be the concern of the Manhattan office.

P: The Ford Motor Co. has on occasion employed the technique of dismissing an executive by sending him and his family to Europe, greeting him on his return with an empty office. Although he got no trip to Europe, and his office furniture was left intact, William C. Cowling was no longer Ford's sales manager last week, after 23 years of service, six as head of sales. Guessers were kept busy finding reasons for the unexplained dismissal which surprised Fordling Cowling and shocked his admirers, but those most frequently mentioned were his pronounced independence and the habit formed by some Ford dealers of referring to the Ford distribution system as the "Cowling System." Adaptable Bill Cowling, once president of Ford-owned Detroit, Toledo & Ironton R. R., was never paid the heroic salary popularly supposed. Henry Ford's sales manager got $35,000 per year and even the bonus in good years seldom brought it close to six figures.

P: "When a president dies, hire a new office boy," is the pet maxim of big Standard Oil Co. of California. Last month Standard's famed President Kenneth Raleigh Kingsbury died in Panama. Last week Standard's directors met briefly, chose as Standard's fourth president a man who joined the company in 1902 as a stenographer--bald, golf-loving William H. Berg, 55. Standard's expert on foreign oil production, President Berg is credited with developing the Bahrein Island oil fields in the Persian Gulf. This week down the ways at Chester, Pa. will slide a new Standard Oil tanker. Name: William H. Berg.

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