Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger Jr. Page B

suffocate a little carrier like Texas International if it ever had the freedom to do so.
    Even to an innovator, even to Frank Lorenzo, the system was fine just as it was.

CHAPTER 3

    NETWORK WARRIORS
    A mong the personality types reigning in American corporations, the aggressor is commonplace. He has an instinct for the jugular. He wishes to dominate. He enjoys the battle as well as the conquest. He breathes inspiration into his subordinates. He seizes on the unexpected. A vastly different species, the bureaucrat, is just as frequently found, and in his own way is as essential to corporate success. He thrives on detail. He revels in systems and processes. He emphasizes reaction over action. On occasion these divergent traits combine in a single executive. One such individual was C. R. Smith, who built American Airlines. Another was the executive who would later follow Smith to the top of American. His name was Robert Crandall.
    Crandall would ultimately become the most feared and powerful man in the global airline industry. His very appearance intimidated people. He had thick lips, a hard, lean body, and blue eyes that flashed intensity, all bearing him a resemblance to the rock star Mick Jagger. He slicked back his hair with “greasy kid stuff,” his part so perfect it looked as if you could cut your wrists on it. Crandall’s canine teeth hung lower than the surrounding teeth. “Fang,” some people called him, though not often in his presence.
    Appearance alone did not account for Crandall’s sobriquet. Crandallsimply loved to triumph over his adversaries, to vanquish them utterly, to run up points on the scoreboard. “Go ahead,” he told a marketing group. “Be ruthless. Be driven. Don’t let anything get in your way.” Though no fan of professional sports, he went out of his way to invoke Vince Lombardi, Lou Holtz, and other coaches whose teams he rarely watched but whose ruthlessness he admired. At a company dinner dance Crandall once cried, “We’llcrunch our competitors so hard even Lombardi will hear it, and nobody will need a hearing aid to know we knocked them off their feet!” And with that he commanded everyone to the dance floor.
    He pounded his desk, sputtered when he shouted, and spit out the vilest curse words—not merely the hell! and son of a bitch! typical of the executive vocabulary but caustic and abrasive words like fucker and cocksucker , with a plume of blue cigarette smoke trailing behind or gathering overhead. Crandall was aware thathe inspired fear in many of the people who worked for him. He once joked that when turning to the mirror while shaving, he expected to seeblack wings.
    But while seized with such emotion, Crandall also had a passion for logic and analysis—for hierarchies, systems, and structures. Let the other guys play poker;Crandall loved bridge, the logician’s game. Crandall settled in a region where country and western and rock and roll reigned supreme, but he brooded to the rational scales of Mozart. Typographical errors, wordmisuse, and grammatical lapses hit him like strikes to the brow; they signaled untrustworthiness. Order was everything. At home his shoptools hung precisely, even if he was seldom there to use them. In later years, he ordered the placement of four custom-made podiums at strategic locations, for quick shipment wherever he happened to be giving a speech; Crandall refused to speak from any lectern failing to meet his specifications. If he noticed his wife’s purse sitting on the kitchen counter, he might pry it open for inspection; finding it in the same condition as any purse, he would dump it out and reorganize it, throwing away the bits of grit that had accumulated in the creases at the bottom. “Itdrives her batshit,” he would remark with a raspy nicotine cackle.
    Above all, Bob Crandall was stricken with personal ambition. Was there a moment, he was once asked, when he realized that he wanted to run American Airlines? “Yeah,” he