Word: sunbeam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fifteen months after taking over as chief of Sunbeam, "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap has cut half of the company's 12,000 jobs ? and quadrupled the stock price, from a pallid $12 to over $49. Now he's putting it up for sale...
...Scott Paper, Dunlap's last labor, doing these days? Swallowed by Kimberly-Clark. How about former charge Lily-Tulip Inc.? Now a lean, mean division of Fort Howard Paper Co. Once Dunlap's bum-to-plum magic act is done lining shareholder pockets (Dunlap himself owns several million in Sunbeam stock), he takes the last sure price-boosting step: feeding it to a big rival. Then ? poof! ? he's gone...
...everybody's happy. Which is why some time after Sunbeam disappears into the maw of some hungry home-products giant, you can figure on Al popping up again, chainsaw drawn, at the helm of some or other troubled ship. The trick is to buy stock before he gets there...
...A.M.A. can make no such claim for its exclusive deal with Sunbeam. Says Dr. Robert Graham of the American Academy of Family Physicians: "I'd be more comfortable if they were assessing all comers...
Perhaps indicative of how out of touch the A.M.A. is was its surprised reaction to the furor that the Sunbeam deal provoked. "People are too willing to think something sinister is going on here," complains Larry Jellen, the A.M.A.'s vice president of marketing. "Our intentions are exceptionally honorable." Maybe so, but the A.M.A. might have found it instructive to do a case history. Back in the 1950s the organization retreated from another health-product-endorsement program out of liability concerns...