Executive Suite Speech

Executive Suite was a 1954 M-G-M movie starring William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Fredric March. It was produced by John Houseman and directed by Robert Wise. Executive Suite was nominated for five Academy Awards, and featured an inspiring speech at the end of the movie by William Holden, which is reproduced below.

The scene for the speech is the boardroom of Tredway Furniture corporation where a meeting is taking place to elect a new president after the death of Avery Bullard, its dynamic president who had rescued the company and led it to being the third largest furniture manufacturer in the country.

The characters involved are the five vice presidents who are vying to become president, Miss Tredway, who is the largest stockholder, and an outside director. Shaw is the VP, Controller (bean counter) who is conniving the hardest to become president, Walling, the young VP of Design and Development, Grimm, VP of Manufacturing, Alderson, VP and Treasurer, and Walt Dudley, VP of Sales.

Shaw: Efficiency has become a dirty word. Budget control has a bad odor. Well, that’s my job. That’s my responsibility, to plug every profit leak, to run to earth every single case of waste and inefficiency in this company. If I have to step on toes and hurt feelings in the process, that can’t be helped. But nobody in this company is going to say I had anything but the best interests of this company at heart while I was doing it. You take a look at my record for the last three years. Fight that record. My record...

Walling: Your record, Shaw?

Shaw: Couldn’t have done it without me. Understand I don’t mean to belittle Mr. Bullard. We all recognize his magnificent contribution to this company during its period of growth.

Walling: In other words Avery Bullard was the right kind of man to save this company from disaster, to build it up and set it on its way. But now we need a different kind of management, one that will dedicate itself to paying the maximum dividends to the stock holders. Is that it?

Shaw: Well, I don’t know if I’d express it in exacly those terms, but, yes, that’s substantially what I do mean.

Walling: Shaw, let me ask you something. The president of a company like Tredway would have to be a man of outstanding qualities, wouldn’t he?

Shaw: Naturally.

Walling: Be a man prepared to make a good many personal sacrifices, willing to devote himself to the company mind and heart, body and soul.

Shaw: If you get the right man, there’d be no worry on that score.

Walling: Why? Why would he do it? What would be his incentive?

Shaw: Outside of salary? There’s such a thing as success isn’t there? Sense of accomplishment.

Walling: Exactly. Now, let’s assume, Shaw, that you’re the man—running Tredway your way. Would you be satisfied to measure your life’s work by how much you raised the dividend? Would you regard your life a success just because you got the dividend to 3 dollars, 4 dollars, 5, or 6 or 7? Would that that be enough? Is that what you’d want engraved on your tombstone when you die, the dividend record of the Tredway Corporation?

Shaw: Are you suggesting that earnings aren’t important?

Walling: I’m suggesting no such thing, and you know it. Shaw is right when he says that we have an obligation to our shareholders. But it’s a bigger obligation than raising the dividend. We have an obligation to keep this company alive. Not just this year, or the next, or the year after that. Sometimes you have to use your profits for the growth of the company, not pay them out in dividends just to impress the stockholders with your management record. There’s your waste, Shaw, there’s your inefficiency. Stop growing and you die. Turn your back on experimentation and planning for tomorrow because they don’t contribute to dividends today, and you won’t have a tomorrow, because you won’t have a company.

Shaw: Avery Bullard didn’t seem to think my policies were exactly destroying this company.

Walling: No. No, he didn’t. And he as wrong. The way of lot of people are wrong these days—grabbing for the quick and easy, the sure thing. That’s just lack of faith in the future. Something that’s in the air today. The groping of a lot of men who know they’ve lost their faith, but aren’t sure what it is or how they happened to lose it. Avery Bullard was one of them. He’d been so busy building a great production machine, he’d lost sight of why he was building it—or why he was the man he was, if he ever really knew?

Miss

Tredway: Do you know, Mr. Walling?

Walling: Yes, I think I do. Avery Bullard was driven by pride. Pride in himself. The urge to do things that no other man on earth could do. He was the man at the top of the tower. Needing no one, wanting no one, only himself. That’s what it took to satisfy his pride. That was his strength, and that his weakness, too.

Grimm: Why shouldn’t a man have pride if he’s earned it?

Walling: All right. But why should that set him apart from the people he’s working with. The force behind a great company has to be more than the pride of one man. It as to be the pride of thousands. You can’t make people work for money alone, you starve their souls when you try it. And you can starve a company to death the same way. Avery Bullard must have known that once. But he’d become a little lost these last few years. The company had been saved, there were no more battles to win. Now he had to find something else to feed his pride: bigger sales, more profits...something. And that’s when we started doing things like this...(picks up a coffee table in a corner)...the KF line. Walt, are your boys proud when they go out and sell this stuff when they know the vinal is going to crack, the veneer split off, and the legs come loose?

Shaw: Wait a minute. That’s price merchandise. It serves a definite purpose in the profit structure of this company. We’re not cheating anybody...

Walling: ...Ourselves...

Shaw: At that price, the customer knows exactly what he’s going to get.

Walling: (Breaks off a table leg.) This! This is what Tredway as come to mean! And what do you suppose people have come to think of us when they buy it. How do you suppose the men in the factory think when they make it? What must they think of management that’s willing to stoop to sell this kind of junk in order to add a dime a year to the dividend? Do you know there are men at Type Street who refuse to work on the KF line, who’ve taken a $7.50 a week cut to get transferred somewhere else.

Shaw: Well, after all, that’s only part of our business. Eventually we can cut down on the line.

Walling: We’ll drop that line! And we‘ll never again ask a man to do anything that will poison his pride in himself or his work! We’ll have a new line of low-priced furniture. A new and different line as different from anything we’re making today as the modern automobile is different from a covered wagon. That’s what you want, Walt, isn’t it? What you’ve always wanted—merchandise that will sell because it has beauty, function, and value, not because the buyers like your Scotch or think you’re a good egg. The kind of stuff that you’ll be able to feel in your guts, Jesse, when you know it’s coming off your production line. A product that you’ll be able to budget to a hundredth of a percent, Shaw, because it’ll be scientifically and efficiently designed, and something you’ll be proud to have your name on, Miss Tredway. We’re going to give the people something they need at a price they can afford to pay. And as fresh needs come up, we’ll satisfy them, too, with something new and even more exciting. When we achieve that, we’ll really start to grow. We’re not going to die! We’re going to live, and it’s going to take every bit of business judgment and creative energy in this company from the middle, to the factory, right to the very top of the tower. And we’re going to do it together. Every one of us. Right here at Tredway.

Alderson: I’m with you, Don.

Dudley: I take great pride in nominating Donald Walling as President of the Tredway Corporation.

(Walling is elected unanimously. It’s a movie.)