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Inside the Ironworks: How Grumman's Glory Days Faded

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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.

"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.

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.

This is a wonderful inside look into a uniquely American Company. This history of the Grumman Corp. will be of great interest to both aerospace and business professionals.

Hats off to George Skurla for sharing with posterity his inside view of a fabled company. The book begins intriguingly: walking empty plant hangers, Skurla takes us back to the bustling world he knew at the start of his career during WWII, when pencil-pushing engineers still learned by getting their hands dirty on the shop floor. We quickly appreciate Grumman's ethic of ruggedness that proved vital to winning the Pacific theater. We're treated to the contrasting yet complementary founding personalities which, like the family atmosphere they engendered, served the company well to a point.

Beyond the first chapters, however, the career narrative rambles. So many names are introduced that a corporate org' chart is needed to keep track of who's who from where. So many voices are invoked, often quoted over more than a page-length, that one easily loses track of who's telling the story. A background in DOD contracting is also assumed.

Even with some procurement background, I felt inadequately educated on a critical issue: precisely how the F-14 nearly bankrupted the company. The best I could gather in one pass: Grumman underbid their first production lots, not raising their quotes enough in the event that Congress would cut its appropriation. Whether it was an incompetent failure or overconfident gamble, Congress saw no indication of a real impact on the contractor and took advantage, plunging Grumman into a financial chasm.

Fortunately, it's more easily understood how the Shah of Iran, the F-15's vertical acceleration, and a good cloud bank combined one day to save their bacon.

Beyond that gem, Skurla does manage to make his case for the demise of an institute he appreciated far more than fellow management. He could trim the payroll and fix a production line, but not convince them of the need for a clear expansion strategy. Beyond the lunar module effort Skurla directed, successors of the introverted Leroy G. hurled scant resources willy-nilly at buses, windmills, and worse. Perhaps not as arrogant as reputed, the Ironworks was nevertheless insular and not as politically connected as the competition. Not surprisingly, while working the X-29 concept aircraft it suddenly found itself on the outside looking in at the emerging world of stealth technology. Grumman could neither stick to its bread-and-butter when needed, nor diversify successfully as the Cold War ended. Small mergers it long shunned; to a major one it ultimately succumbed, and even this cost Grumman millions after it had committed to joining what became Lockheed-Martin.

Ultimately, in a work published after his passing, Skurla's passion for his profession, company, and even the people he laid off shines through. Unfortunately, it fails as in-depth yet succinct, rewarding read of lessons-learned, which it could have with better co-authoring and editing.