Oyster News 49 - Oyster Yachts

‘ I don’t choose to be a
competitor at golf, or
sailing, or playing Bridge.
I try to do well, but
winning at those things
isn’t crucial for me.
My competitive instincts
have always been
focused on business. In
business, competitive
success makes a
huge difference
’
22 www.oystermarine.com
Seabees. Jobless at war’s end, Crandall’s
father found employment at Phoenix
Mutual Insurance as a management
trainee. Starting in 1945, he travelled
the country with his family for seven
years learning the insurance trade in
different offices.
It was during that period that Robert
Crandall became the habitual "new kid" at
14 different schools, a tough role. "There
were always fights with other kids to prove
myself," Crandall says. "It was a big pain. I
didn’t enjoy it. But it was unavoidable."
Hard work was also unavoidable. He had a
paper route and worked in grocery stores.
In 1952, the family returned to Rhode
Island. Crandall entered Barrington High
School where one of the first students he
met was Jan Schmults, the girl he would
marry. When he graduated in 1953 Crandall
was voted best student, most ambitious,
and "most affectionate boy" in his class.
After three semesters on scholarship at
William and Mary College, Crandall
transferred to University of Rhode Island to
be closer to Jan. He buffed the cafeteria
floor and did other part time jobs to cover
expenses. After graduating with a degree
in business administration, he and Jan
married. Their honeymoon consisted of the
drive to Ft. Benning, Georgia, where
Crandall did a six-month tour of duty while
Jan worked as a nurse.
After a short stint with an insurance
company, Crandall accepted an Arthur
Young scholarship to the University of
Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of
Business. He managed a radio station at
night. He would have preferred law school,
but he couldn’t afford it.
After Wharton, he joined Eastman Kodak
as a credit representative. When he was
told it would take him 20 years at Kodak
to become a vice president, he left and
joined The Hallmark Card Company where
he was asked to run the computer
programming division. The fact that he
knew little about computers didn’t stop
him. He learned, and the decision turned
out to be pivotal. Three years later he
joined TWA as assistant treasurer in
charge of credit operations. Not long
afterwards he was running data
processing for TWA. He was then
attracted to Bloomingdale’s by an offer of
senior vice president and treasurer, but
soon discovered he didn’t care for
retailing. Finally, in 1973, he landed at
American Airlines as chief financial officer.
The first thing Crandall did at American
was upgrade the airline’s data processing
system. Next he modernised American’s
computerised reservation system (SABRE),
to the point where it was eventually spun
off as a private company serving all
airlines. Two years later as Sr. VP,
marketing, Crandall was faced with the
problem of how to generate revenue from
unsold seats, the bane of any airline’s
economics. Charter companies were luring
customers away with lower fares. So
Crandall invented the Super Saver concept
– large discounts for tickets purchased
well in advance – a plan quickly copied by
other carriers.
When the airline business was stunned by
federal deregulation in 1978, Crandall had
risen to President and CEO. In the face of
deregulation, Wall Street took one look at
American’s long-haul fleet and lack of
hubs and dubbed the airline a loser.
Crandall proved them wrong. His solution
was to build a complex hub-and-spoke
system and to emphasise technology.
During Crandall’s tenure, American
maintained one of the largest staffs of
operations research professionals of any
company in the country. The cumulative
effect of those and other decisions
resulted in the lower fares and better
schedules economists had thought
deregulation would produce and better
results for American Airlines.
"Management," Crandall says, "is a twopart
proposition. First is the creative vision:
you lay out what you think the future is.
Conceptualisation. Part two is execution,
making it happen. You have to adapt, but
everyone adapts. You also have to have
accurate vision. What happened at Braniff
is a case in point. American has often
been accused of putting Braniff out of
business, but that’s not what happened.
When deregulation came along, Braniff
already had a small hub system in Dallas
that was working well for them. But their
top management determined that