In Memoriam
Harry E. Figgie Jr.: October 28, 1923 – July 14, 2009
It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Cleveland native and entrepreneur, Harry E. Figgie Jr., on the morning of July 14, 2009. He was 85.
Mr. Figgie is probably best known for his stewardship of Figgie International. In 1963 he took over the Automatic Sprinkler Corporation of America, a struggling $23 million sprinkler company, and in the next two decades turned it into a $1.3 billion diversified corporation, owner of such well known brands as Rawlings Sporting Goods, American LaFrance fire trucks, and Fred Perry Sportswear.
Mr. Figgie is the author of several books, including most recently, How to Build a Billion Dollar Company from Scratch (Ruder Finn Press, 2008). He also wrote the bestseller, Bankruptcy 1995 (Little Brown, 1992), in which he warned of the dangers of spiraling federal deficits, and The Cost Reduction and Profit Improvement Handbook (AMACOM, 1990), which taught a generation of executives the straightforward management techniques that made the dozens of companies he was associated with so successful.
Mr. Figgie grew up in Cleveland in the 1930s. He lost his father in 1940 at the age of sixteen, and five years later was fighting in General Patton’s Third Army with an infantry division in Europe. After returning home, he finished his last two years of undergraduate work with a Bachelor’s in metallurgical engineering. Next he received an MBA from Harvard as a member of the Class of 1949, which Larry Shames, in his 1974 book about the Class, called “the most wildly successful batch of MBAs to have shared a campus anywhere, ever.” Along the way he also accumulated a law degree and a masters in industrial engineering by going to night school while working full time in various sales and manufacturing positions.
From 1953 until 1962, Mr. Figgie worked at the consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, where he became one of the country’s leading cost reduction experts. In 1963, after gaining more operating experience as a group vice president of A.O. Smith, he patched together the financing to purchase the Automatic Sprinkler Corporation of America, which later changed its name to ATO Inc., and then to Figgie International.
Throughout his business career, Mr. Figgie warned of the dangers of unchecked government spending. He was a co-chair of President Reagan’s 1982 Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, called the Grace Commission after its chairman, J. Peter Grace, which with the help of more than 2,000 volunteers came up with 2,500 recommendations which, if implemented, would have saved $1.9 trillion annually by 2000. Also in the 1980s Mr. Figgie commissioned The Hyperinflation Survival Guide, an investigation of how businesses in South American were coping with double and triple digit inflation. Mr. Figgie, who at the time of his death ran his family company, the Ohio business, Clark Reliance, as Chairman, also directed the family charitable foundation, which funded various educational initiatives, including six university chairs.
Mr. Figgie is predeceased by his son, Harry E. Figgie III, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon at University Hospitals who died in 1999. He is survived by his wife, Nancy; his two sons, Mark, an orthopedic surgeon in New York, and Matthew, vice chairman of Clark Reliance; and seven grandchildren.
Memorial contributions can be made to the St. Christopher’s by the River Harry E. Figgie Jr. Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 519, Gates Mills, Ohio 44040. Arrangements by Chambers Funeral Home (216) 251-6566.
Obituaries have been published at the Cleveland Plain Dealer
and the Wall Street Journal.