Executives: Able, Aggressive

EXECUTIVES Able, Agressive—and Out When he became the $150,000-a-year chairman and chief executive officer of Cities Service Co. two years ago, John L. Burns admitted that his experience in the petroleum industry amounted to knowing how to “fill the tank of my car.” Yet he figured that he could do the job through pure executive ability.

Apparently, he was wrong. Last week Cities Service, the U.S.’s twelfth largest oil company, announced that Burns, 59, was leaving, in the usual amicable way to pursue the usual other interests of his own. Charles S. Mitchell, 58, who has spent 37 years in the petroleum business, moved up from the Cities Service presidency to succeed Burns.

This was not the first such setback for Burns, who combines his executive ability, recognized even by his critics, with rare aggressiveness — sometimes too rare for his employers to stomach. A longtime star in the management-con ulting firm of Booz, Allen & Hamil ton, Burns presided over a study of RCA’s marketing problems that impressed RCA’s Chairman David Sarnoff to the extent that in 1957 he hired Burns as president. The mutual admiration did not last. Under Burns, RCA became deeply involved in the computer making business, and in one year took a $100 million loss. Only in 1969 is the company’s computer division likely to get into the black. In the meantime, Burns was politely ousted.

He spent a couple of years setting up his own investment outfit. Then he got an offer to head Cities Service, a company dominated by Oklahoma oilmen who, understandably, wanted to make their big corporation bigger. Burns took on the job, and started out to do what he thought the oilmen wanted. He tried to diversify Cities Service, acquired Fesco, Inc., a maker of molded-plastic housewares, and agreed to acquire, pending stockholder approval, Akron Equipment Co., a tire-mold manufacturer. So far so good. But Burns had also urged that Cities Service buy out Hugoton Production Co., a Kansas-based producer of natural gas, and a uranium mining and processing firm called United Nuclear Corp. Both deals fell through, partly, it seems evident, because the Cities Service powers, whether right or wrong, were leery about committing too much money too fast to external expansion. The policy-difference became so deep that, once again, John Burns was out.