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Show 12- To play the creative role effectively and to administer the wealth created obviously required an addition of new skills and a strengthened organization. Our success in accomplishing this may well prove to be our greatest achievement of the past decade. Our ten-man Board of Directors, headed by Marriner Eccles, represents ownership in the company, every director being the spokesman for interests having a substantial stake in the company's success. Given this incentive, they keep themselves fully informed of company affairs and make decisions with the consummate care that comes with betting one's own money. The faces on the Board are changed but the family names are not much different in 1960 than they were in 1940, 1920, or 1900. Only two members of the Board are full time members of management, and these two (the President and myself) are the only company employees associated with the large stockholder families. The balance of the organization has been recruited from the ranks of professional management and skilled technical people. It is a young organization, with the majority of the key people in their forties or early fifties and several important positions are occupied by people in their late thirties. If we are relatively young now, certainly we are older and more experienced than we were when we brought into being these new phases of our company activities, and we have opportunities to seize in the future with the benefit of the experience that we have gained in making mistakes in the past. I emphasize the importance of personnel here, because while any management must in some measure "run on its record", it is particularly important in a project-type business like ours. We have no franchise with the consumer, no patent protection, no impregnable defense against competitive |