Rand Araskog

Rand Vincent Araskog (born October 31, 1931 in Fergus Falls , Minnesota , United States ) is an American industrial manager. From 1979 to 1998 he was chairman of the board of directors and CEO of the conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (ITT) and had a seat on the board of directors of numerous companies from various industries both parallel and after this time .

Araskog was able to stabilize ITT in the 1980s after it had transformed itself under its President Harold Geneen through takeovers into a difficult-to-manage conglomerate of companies from very different industries and was also shaken by involvement in political scandals. In the 1990s, he finally split the group into three independent sub-companies.

Life

Rand V. Araskog grew up on a farm as the son of the farmer Randolph Victor Araskog (1901–1987) and his wife Hilfred Mathilda geb. Swanson (1902-1992). His grandparents had immigrated from Sweden in the previous century and originally went by the name Nilson . After their immigration, they chose the name of their Swedish home region as their new family name.

Rand Araskog attended high school, where he participated in the debating club and the school newspaper team , and allegedly did a number of side jobs to supplement his pocket money . He then moved to the United States Military Academy in West Point , where he was able to complete an engineering degree with a bachelor's degree (BS). In an article he wrote and published in the American Reader's Digest in December 1988, it can be read that at the beginning he found it difficult to be so far away from his family, especially at Christmas. He considered leaving West Point and going to a university in Minnesota until his father visited him to encourage him while they were together. He then studied at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University .

His first professional position was assistant director in the United States Department of Defense in Washington DC from 1954 to 1959. In 1960 he left the department and moved to the aeronautical division of Honeywell, Inc. in Minneapolis as marketing director . After another six years, he became head of the Aerospace Electronics, Components and Energy group and, at the same time, Vice President of International Telephone & Telegraph, led by Harold Geneen . After his move to the Supervisory Board in 1978, forced by a political scandal, Lyman C. Hamilton led the company, but could not last long. Rand Araskog succeeded him at the head of the company in 1979 after 18 months. After a long phase of very aggressive acquisitions and expansion under Geneen, he pursued a policy of stabilizing and consolidating the conglomerate, which is extremely diversified in very different industries . In 1995, he split ITT into three separate, publicly traded companies: ITT Destinations , ITT Hartford Group and ITT Industries .

In Germany, the electronics subsidiary Standard Elektrik Lorenz (SEL) from Stuttgart was initially reorganized under his leadership in the early 1980s . After a very expensive attempt in 1985 to penetrate the home market in the United States, which is dominated by AT&T , with the ITT area for communications technology, which is strongly focused on Europe , and in the knowledge that SEL would not be able to step out of the shadow of the German market leader Siemens in the long term , he initiated the withdrawal of his company from the telecommunications business. Alcatel NV was created by merging with the communications engineering of the French Compagnie générale d'électricité (CGE) in 1986

He has been a member of the Board of Directors of ArcelorMittal USA since March 2004, of Cablevision Systems Corporation since 2005 and, as an independent member, of CSC Holdings, LLC . He has since held this position at Alcatel-Lucent , Shell Oil Company , Dow Jones & Company and Rayonier Inc. Since March 1998 he has been a private investor and principal at RVA Investments .

honors and awards

In 1987 he was appointed officer of the French Legion of Honor . In addition, in 1991 the Italian President awarded him the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and the President of Chile the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins . The private Hofstra University in Hempstead awarded him an honorary doctorate.

family

Rand Vincent Araskog has been married to Jessie Marie Gustafson since 1956 and has three children, two daughters and one son.

Publications

In addition to numerous articles that have been published in various magazines over the years, he has written the following books:

• with James L. Bikoff: Toward the Year 2000 . ITT Corporation. New York 1987
• Dawn Raiders and White Knights: The Inside Story of a Corporation Under Siege . HarperCollins, New York 1989, ISBN 1-853-36160-7
• The ITT Wars: An Insider's View of Hostile Takeovers . Beard Books, New York 2000, ISBN 1-89312-238-7

Web links

• gettyimages , photograph by Rand Araskog dated February 7, 1997 with a detailed description.
• Araskog, Rand Vincent , short biography in The International Who is Who 2004 , 67th Edition, Europa Publications 2003, ISBN 1-85743-217-7

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Randolph Victor Araskog in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved June 7, 2016.
2. ↑ Hilfred Mathilda Swanson Araskog in the database of Find a Grave . Retrieved June 7, 2016.
3. ↑ Rand Araskog . In: Munzinger Online / Personen - Internationales Biographisches Archiv , accessed on May 23, 2016
4. ↑ Current Biography Yearbook 1991 , Volume 52, HW Wilson Co., 1992, p. 26
5. ↑ Rand V. Araskog: My father's greatest poison . In: Reader's Digest , December 1988, Vol. 133 Issue 800, p. 177. ( excerpt )
6. ↑ About ITT ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , on the German company website, accessed on May 24, 2016 
7. ↑ Merger plans at CGE and the SEL parent ITT . In the archive of Computerwoche , July 4, 2016, accessed on May 19, 2016
8. ↑ ^{a b} Cablevision Systems, New York - Executive Profile: Rand V. Araskog . On: Bloomberg News , accessed May 25, 2016
9. ↑ Honorary Degrees , on the university website, accessed on May 23, 2016