A former editor-in-chief of a leading aviation and space magazine provides an insider's view of the triumphs and disappointments of America's one-time top aerospace contractor. Collaborating with George Skurla, the former president and chairman of Grumman Aerospace, William H. Gregory traces the company's rise from its humble beginnings in the 1930s through the war years and on to later successes with the A-6 and Apollo space vehicles. He also tells how the august, well-established business failed to keep itself together and by the 1990s was left with no choice but to be taken over by one of its biggest competitors. Part history, part memoir, the book describes the rise and fall through the eyes of Skurla, who began his career as an apprentice engineer on the production line at Grumman in 1944 and retired in 1986 at the head of its largest entity, Grumman Aerospace. As a case history of the company, the book is without parallel as it traces Grumman from its origins in an abandoned building to a multi-billion-dollar business that eventually wound up as a junior partner to another firm. While other books have focused on the design and performance its aircraft, this one provides a view of the company's achievements and shortcomings from the inside. Skurla was there on the shop floor, on the carrier deck, and in the boardroom, and he reports events candidly. The book also includes the perspectives of top naval aviators and other Grumman personnel on why the story ended as it did. In listing the factors that contributed to Grumman's failure, Skurla and Gregory point to poor planning, internal scandals, and misguided investments as factors contributing to its downfall. They also see theintrusion of politics into the business of defense and the profound differences in the design and manufacture of military versus commercial products as problems to be avoided in the future.
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"...a most welcome addition to aerospace literature." -- Choice, January 2005
About the Author
George M. Skurla, now deceased, spent 42 years at Grumman rising through the ranks to the position of president before retiring in 1986. William H. Gregory, a resident of Viera, Florida, was an editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology from 1956 to 1987, his last years as editor in chief.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A potentially good read in need of an editor,
By
This review is from: Inside the Ironworks: How Grumman's Glory Days Faded (Hardcover)
Among the major American aerospace contractors of the twentieth century, Grumman was unique. Located on Long Island, it reflected the temper of its founders, Leroy "Roy" Grumman and Leon "Jake" Swirbul. More insular and less politically savvy than its West Coast competitors, it was a company that took care of its employees and engendered an uncommon loyalty among them as a result. From the start, it established a reputation for creating outstanding naval combat aircraft. Among its great airplanes were the premier shipboard fighter of the Second World War, the F6F Hellcat; the long-lived and capable A-6 and EA-6 attack planes; and the glamorous F-14 Tomcat swing-wing fighter. In the 1960s, it won the contract from NASA to build the Lunar Module, which carried twelve astronauts to the surface of the Moon and back, and was the "lifeboat" for the crew of Apollo 13. Yet despite these great technical achievements, in 1993 it became the junior partner in a merger with Northrop, and its aircraft manufacturing presence in Long Island has disappeared. What went wrong?The late George Skurla joined Grumman in 1944, starting in the Plant 2 production shop in Bethpage, and ending his career as president of Grumman Corporation in 1985. This gave him a unique perspective on the nature of Grumman's growth and its eventual decline. In his view, the roots of Grumman's failure stemmed from the corporate culture established by founder Roy Grumman, who saw his company as a small, family firm and was uninterested in growth. This was compounded by a series of management missteps over time, starting with the contractual and production difficulties of the F-14 in the early 1970s, which nearly bankrupted the company and led to a cooling of its long-established relationship with the U.S. Navy. Later, haphazard diversification efforts under John Bierwirth, especially the sale of the profitable Grumman American subsidiary with its Gulfstream business jet to Allen Paulson, gradually chipped away at the company's great strengths. This book is Skurla's rumination on what he called Grumman's "unfulfilled destiny". Unfortunately, Skurla's story suffers from its rambling nature and disjointedness. Co-author William Gregory, to whom fell the task of putting his conversations with Skurla on paper, fails to weave Skurla's words into an effective narrative. Both he and Skurla are "insiders", who already know much of the history that is the background to Skurla's recollections. For the reader who doesn't already know this history, there is often a feeling of walking into the middle of a conversation and being unsure of the topic. A little discussion of the context would go a long way. Chronologically, the text jumps forward and backward, sometimes in successive paragraphs. For a story that attempts to trace the causes of the demise of a corporation, this is a serious distraction. Quotations are interjected in such a way that it is unclear where Skurla's words stop and someone else's begin. Indeed, it is difficult at times to tell whether Gregory is quoting someone directly, or whether he is quoting Skurla's recollection of a conversation with that person. If you are particularly interested in the story of Grumman, or you are familiar with the history of the key events in its fall, then this book is useful for the insights that Skurla brings. However, to the reader looking for a good, readable insider's story of the decline of a great corporation, this book is not for you.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An aerospace giant that lost focus and lost independence,
By Christopher Crossley "The Man from Hubei" (Wuhan, Hubei Province, China) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Inside the Ironworks: How Grumman's Glory Days Faded (Hardcover)
"Unfulfilled destiny" is how George Skurla sums up the fortunes of the company he spent his entire professional career with. He begins the book in a somber mood, thus trying to convey his depression at seeing the aftermath of what had been a mighty company reduced to the junior partner in one of today's big-name aerospace firms. Skurla follows the highs and lows of a company that had built thousands of airplanes for the U.S. Navy during World War II, had built the lunar module which the Apollo 13 crew had used as a lifeboat, and had diversified into truck bodies, buses, hydrofoils and even maritime container refrigeration. Yet the company's "bachelor life" ended abruptly when it merged with one of its biggest rivals in 1994.Skurla calls the F-14 "the crux of the Grumman story". The essence is that of an airplane with a troubled history. Basically, Congress was dictating what the Navy should have, and the Navy's fighter and attack pilots, both active and retired, had different ideas about what the airplane should do. Inevitably, as time dragged on and Grumman spent pots of money in defending the F-14 before a plethora of Congressional committees, the cost per unit soared, and no lower-cost alternative seemed to be available at the time. Emphasis on the lightweight attack airplane concept did not help Grumman's cause, either, because many believed that this would mean a low-capability machine. Grumman wanted to supply the F-14 because of its ruggedness in keeping with the founders' mantra for what an airplane should be designed to do, namely survive in battle conditions, and because of its ability to challenge long-range Soviet Navy bombers from hundreds of miles out from the carrier group. Yet some admirals considered the F-14 too complex and wanted the lighter, more maneuverable F/A-18 as an alternative. The F-14 program, in taking the company toward near bankruptcy, produced the most headaches for Grumman. Lew Evans, the top man until his death in 1972, said that "the [engineers] design things, but then the manufacturing group has a hard time building them". Skurla was running the lunar module program at the time, yet such was Evans' desperation that he cajoled him into sorting out the F-14 mess. Yet the horrible D-word, downsizing, was hanging over Grumman's head even in the early 1970s, and many believed - even within the company - that Grumman was not doing enough in this regard, allowing overheads to rise alarmingly. Iran's Shah then threw the company a lifeline by ordering 80 F-14s - "a marketing and finance coup," notes Skurla. All but one had been delivered by the time of the Iranian revolution. Grumman attempted to diversify into the civilian market with the Gulfstream series of bizjets. What was lacking was service support for worldwide customers, yet the top man said that Grumman would not involve itself in that. Hence, the nub of the problem: Grumman was good at building, but not at marketing - a significant flaw in any strategy to build and sell commercial airplanes. It eventually sold off what could have become a very profitable line of business to General Dynamics, the firm behind the F-16 and the F-111. This was yet another example of Grumman's "unfulfilled destiny," according to Skurla, as was Grumman's failure to get involved with the Harrier/AV-8 project or air-launched anti-ship missiles (for reasons that, strangely, he does not elaborate) or to expand its electronics division, which was (so Skurla alleges) bigger than even Cisco Systems was in the mid-1980s. Skurla details Grumman's woes regarding what he calls "hope-and-pray" diversification. Bosses recruited in from outside were diversifying into anything not remotely connected with airplanes for the Navy, leading to staggering financial losses. The corporate culture, he contends, was all wrong, although even he was surprised when Grumman actually won an Army contract to build a close support airplane, the OV-1. Although he makes clear he was never against diversification per se, Skurla nevertheless dismisses the many loss-making ventures as "mixing jelly beans with diamonds". Worse, however, was the fact that the company lacked any long-term planning strategies and one of its chief executives was fired after a boardroom scandal involving the siphoning off of company money to fund the purchasing of real estate. Even when "consolidation" began to worry the aerospace industry, Grumman bosses were claiming that the company could still enter into joint ventures with firms involved in electronics. Yet, in the early 1990s, the Defense Department signaled the death-knell of so many overblown independent defense contractors by announcing that government funding would drop sharply in the wake of the end of the Cold War. "Consolidation" became inevitable, and the merger with Northrop happened eight years after Skurla's retirement, yet, contrary to reader expectations perhaps, there was no real drama describing how the merger happened: it was as if it was all going to happen, anyway, so it is described in somewhat anticlimactic language. Skurla nevertheless does a good job on focusing on "how Grumman's glory days faded", since the book is not a history of the company. Grumman could, he claims, have done as well as Boeing had it entered the commercial aviation market, only Roy Grumman himself rejected this idea. "What would you rather do," he asked Skurla once, "build a million mousetraps or one locomotive?" Nevertheless, selling off the Gulfstream was, he believes, one of the company's greatest mistakes. The name Grumman does still survive, yet "Grummanites" like the late George Skurla, who died in the month of 9/11, could only wonder at what might have been.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brought Me back,
By Go-Rilla (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Inside the Ironworks: How Grumman's Glory Days Faded (Hardcover)
I used to work for Grumman during the F-14 "glory days".In fact before I became a Budget Planner, I used to work in the Clean Room attaching "honeycomb" for the F-14 wings. Grumman did it right back in those days regarding employee morale. Every once in awhile, employees were encouraged to watch "fly bys" of the Tomcat over the runway by Plant 4. It was a great period of my life. The book brought back memories as well as info that the lower level workers had no idea was going on. We need more books about that great "family friendly" company before it became Northrup-Grumman.
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