WSJ on Raytheon’s Thomas Phillips

The Wall Street Journal on Raytheon’s CEO Thomas Phillips:

He was born of Greek parents in Istanbul and originally named Athanasius Leonidas Philippides. His father died within a few years of the son’s birth. He, his sister and his mother left Turkey, lived in Greece and settled in Canada in 1929. In 1936, they moved to Boston, where his mother married a Greek-American who ran a cafe.

The young man won admission to the prestigious Boston Latin School, putting him on a college track. He enrolled at Northeastern University, where he played football and basketball, then was drafted into the Army in 1943 and sent to Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He was bound for duty in the Pacific when Japan surrendered in 1945. He returned to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech.

Raytheon hired him in 1948 and quickly gave him responsibility for overseeing missile-development programs and other projects. He became president in 1964 and CEO four years later. “He had an uncanny knack for not making mistakes,” Charles F. Adams, a former Raytheon chairman, recalled later.

In the 1960s, Raytheon was diversifying to reduce reliance on military orders. The company had developed microwave-cooking technology in the 1940s after a Raytheon engineer noticed that a candy bar in his breast pocket melted when he stood near a device generating microwaves. Raytheon sold its Radarange ovens to restaurants, but Mr. Phillips wanted to break into the home market. The company bought a home-appliance maker, Amana Refrigeration Inc., in 1965 and soon introduced a countertop microwave.

Mr. Phillips pursued Beech Aircraft Corp. for years, and the company finally agreed to buy it in 1979 for about $580 million. Raytheon tried to break into the word-processing market by purchasing Lexitron Corp. in 1978. That business flopped and was sold in 1984.

Mr. Phillips, who retired as chairman in 1991, remained on the company’s board until 2000. The company eventually sold Beech and the home-appliance business.

Posted by on January 19th, 2019 at 6:42 pm


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