Mr. Automation

The new breed of man who succeeds in business is the executive who knows how to automate and cut costs. Last week Westinghouse Electric, the second biggest U.S. electrical-equipment manufacturer (after General Electric), picked for its president a man who fits that mold so perfectly that he is known as "Mr. Automation." The new chief is Donald Clemens Burnham, 48, who makes a fetish of efficiency but also manages to smile at it. He is, besides, an ingenious engineer who is also a supersalesman.

Whimsical Junking. Westinghouse directors picked Burnham, who was vice president of the industrial-products group, from among 43 vice presidents to take over from ailing President Mark W. Cresap, 53. A onetime management consultant who in five years at Westinghouse brought the company from malaise to new health, Cresap's own health has been bad ever since a bout with hepatitis last year. Recent complications brought doctor's orders to give up work completely, and last week Cresap underwent surgery at Pittsburgh's Presbyterian Hospital for a gastric hemorrhage.

Don Burnham, his successor, is Massachusetts-born and Purdue-educated.

He started as an engineer for General Motors, where a former boss remembers him as "an intense young man who moved so fast that his coattails were flying most of the time." When he was lured to Westinghouse in 1954, he had risen to assistant chief engineer of the Oldsmobile Division, become an automation expert who was largely credited with stepping up Olds engine production from 30 to 85 an hour.

Westinghouse had all the challenges an efficiency expert needed: much of its equipment and many of its methods were obsolete. As vice president in charge of manufacturing, Burnham played the key role in a new automation program, systematically changed Westinghouse from a "job shop" type of operation to the latest assembly-line methods, which saved the company millions. On one occasion he whimsically presented an ancient drill press with a 50-year service ribbon before junking it. When he took over the industrial-products division, he launched a study to determine how to make every product more cheaply and simply. His division soon became one of the company's most profitable.

Who Is He? A nonsmoker who can nurse a drink or an interesting idea for hours, Burnham wears loose-fitting clothes that give him a rumpled, unpretentious look. He has already shown that he has no intention of changing his ways as Westinghouse's chief; right off, he declined the president's right to a chauffeured Cadillac, preferring to drive his Corvair to work as usual over the five miles from his Mount Lebanon, Pa., home, where he lives with his wife and four of his five children.

His selection surprised almost everyone in Pittsburgh except close associates. The new president of Westinghouse is not even listed in the Pittsburgh Registry of Corporation Executives, and oddly, in view of Burnham's penchant for automation, the head of the Westinghouse union local had never heard of him.

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