The Box - Marc Levinson [35]
The new Pan-Atlantic office had a very different atmosphere. Malcom McLean had a simply furnished glass-fronted office facing a large, open floor on which desks were lined up side by side. Every morning, McLean wandered the floor to check on the latest cash flow statement or the status of shipbuilding plans, disregarding hierarchy to get the information he wanted. The company’s tone, though, was set by his sister Clara. Her desk was in the middle of the floor, where she could keep an eye on everything and everyone. She knew who had come in late. She decorated the office; managers who were promoted into glass-fronted offices of their own found that she had selected their furnishings for them, right down to the art. “If you put a picture or a calendar on the wall, you got a note from Clara the next morning,” one recalled. She set the rules: coffee nowhere but the coffee room, no personal phone calls, desks cleared every night. She personally reviewed every single time card and approved every hire.8
Malcom McLean was not the only shipping magnate with an interest in containerization. In 1954, as McLean was leasing terminals for his proposed roll on-roll off service on the East Coast, the Matson Navigation Company began to sponsor academic research on cargo ha.ndling. Matson, based in San Francisco, was thinking about containers as well, but its approach was the polar opposite of McLean’s.
Matson, established in 1882, had been a loosely managed, family-dominated company that grew from a single ship in Hawaii into a transportation conglomerate. It owned California oil wells, oil tankers, and tanks in the Hawaiian Islands to store the oil. It owned passenger ships and built hotels on Waikiki Beach to attract passengers. It owned Hawaiian sugar plantations and the ships to carry sugar to the mainland. For a few years after World War II, it even owned an airline. None of this made much money, and the company’s underlying problem was that many of its big shareholders didn’t want it to make much money. The board of directors included representatives of major Hawaiian sugar and pineapple growers whose main interest was a cheap way to get their products to market. Whether the shipping service made a profit was almost incidental.9
Things began to change in 1947, when the Matson family convinced veteran steamship executive John E. Cushing to postpone his planned retirement and serve for three years as president. Cushing put the company on a budget for the first time and took a serious interest in addressing dismally low productivity. In 1948, Matson installed a revolutionary mechanized system to ship sugar to the mainland in bulk rather than in hundred-pound bags. Bulk sugar had required large investments—huge bins at the Hawaii end to hold the raw sugar, a special fleet of trucks to carry the sugar from mills to the pier, conveyors to move the sugar from the trucks to the top of the bin, and more conveyors to recirculate it within the bins, so the sticky substance would not solidify in place. These outlays had brought vastly lower costs. Sugar had given Matson a feel for what automation could achieve. Shortly after Cushing’s departure, the company decided to look into mechanizing the handling of the general cargo it carried between the West Coast and Hawaii.10
Matson moved deliberately. Pan-Atlantic, under McLean’s control, was a scrappy upstart