Fair & Over-Square

Grinding up Oregon's 12,000-ft. Canyon Creek Pass one recent evening, the drivers of three mammoth trailer trucks stared in astonishment as a Pacific Intermountain Express Co. rig with a huge load and a notably undersized engine compartment blithely pulled past them. Driving the P.I.E. truck was a power plant that marked a long step forward in U.S. engine design; the V8-265 Vine diesel turned out by Cummins Engine. Co. of Columbus, Ind. Built on a new (for diesels) over-square* design, the Vine is as much as 44% smaller and lighter than other comparable diesels. As a result, it will not only give truckers more miles to the gallon, but will also allow them to carry up to 10% extra payload without violating state weight and length limits.

Development of the Vine is one more step in a process that has enabled little (5,600 employees) Cummins Engine Co. to elbow aside the giants and carve out for itself 60% of the U.S. market for diesel truck engines. Cummins' achievement is all the more remarkable since it makes no trucks itself, must depend for its sales on the loyalty of truckers who specify Cummins engines when they order from the truck manufacturers (who would understandably prefer to install their own engines). In response to truckers' demands, most of the major truckmakers--White, Mack, International Harvester and Ford--are readying chassis to accommodate the Vine and its smaller stablemate, the V6-2OO Vim.

Road to Success. Behind Cummins' remarkable success is an equally remarkable man: Chairman Joseph Irwin Miller, 52, A tall, gaunt, Christian intellectual. Miller is the only layman ever to rise to the presidency of the National Council of Churches, and he runs his company in accordance with his belief that "being greedy and selfish is not the way to be happy and successful."

At college (Yale and Oxford), Miller studied Latin and Greek and aspired to architecture. But in 1934 he was called home to Columbus to take charge of the least promising of the wealthy Miller family's far-flung enterprises: a consistently unprofitable plant that had been built to produce a new kind of diesel engine developed by the family chauffeur. By pressing tirelessly for mechanical perfection of the diesel engine and touting its economy, Miller transmuted this white elephant into a golden goose. Though Cummins' sales declined slightly to $64 million in 1961's first half, the new engines should soon propel the company's earnings to record highs.

Ethics for Engines. Pressed for time by his church (he is a member of the Disciples of Christ) and other business interests, Miller leaves day-to-day direction of Cummins to President Don Tull, 55, does not even keep an office in the company's Columbus plant. But it is Miller who makes the policy decisions and spurs on Cummins' research and development department. And all of Cummins' operations are pervaded by Miller's pragmatic Christianity. Some Miller principles:

sb PROFITS. "The idea that the highest morality brings the lowest profit does not necessarily apply. If we concentrate on giving the consumer what he needs at a price favorable to him, profits roll in as a byproduct."

sb WAGES. "The ideal would be to pay the highest individual wages and have the lowest labor costs in the industry."

sb UNIONS. "The union is a necessary protection for the individual caught up in a vast machine--and it keeps management on its toes."

sb PRODUCTS. "The temptation is to design an engine that would cost you the least in tooling up. But it's not the right engine for the owner. So this is immoral and self-defeating."

Christian Competition. Miller's principles pay off; Cummins' high productivity--and consequent low labor overhead--is one of its chief competitive advantages. Nor does Miller's Christianity deter him from trying to beat the pants off a competitor by all honorable means. In fact, he believes that beating out a competitor constitutes a favor: "It stimulates him." Miller himself was stimulated to develop the over-square engine by a Caterpillar Tractor Co. report that said flatly that it could not be done for diesels on a practical basis. Miller decided to show them that it could.

Though the first fruits of his decision, Vim and Vine, promise to tighten Cummins' hold on the big-truck market, the most important consequence of over-square design may prove to be two smaller Cummins engines--Val and Vit--which are compact enough to fit into medium trucks and autos. With Val and Vit, Miller hopes to open up the huge "stop-and-go" market of light delivery vans and taxis, where a diesel's durability and fuel economy have a distinct edge over gas engines. If he does, he may yet fulfill the dieselmakers' dream of tapping a market so large that volume production would make a diesel as cheap to purchase as a gasoline engine.

* In an over-square engine, the cylinder bore is enlarged, creating a larger combustion chamber for extra power, while the stroke of the piston is shortened, thus reducing piston and cylinder-wall wear.

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