For this was a time of transition for Prince, a step away from a business with roots in the Old World toward a business firmly anchored in the New. The father had once insisted on exposing his son to the lesson of the Ronzoni trial, and now that lesson seemed both palpable and inescapable. But the lesson wasn't the risks of greed, young Joe said later. It was that a businessman could never afford to take things personally.
V SUCCESSION
Listen, I tell him, you're gonna have trouble with your father. I'm a self-made man, I'm accustomed to telling people to do this, do that. Now you come in here, I'm going through a change of life, people won't know who to listen to. I can learn, I tell him, I'll retrain myself, but you gotta understand this change I'm going through too, OK? Now give me a report card so I know how I'm doing. He gives me one, it's 95. Great, I said, I'm very happy with 95. Just don't go looking for the other 5%, because you'll never get it from me.
(JP)
My line to my father is the same one I expect my employees to give me: you hired me to do a job, you may not like the way I go about doing it, but if I tell you what the results should be and I achieve them, then you can keep your mouth shut. If I don't, shame on me. And I damn well better succeed more than I fail. Of course, with the father-son thing, it's not quite that simple. Sometimes we've had to agree just to stay out of each other's way. I'd say most of my time [during the management transition] was spent being a buffer between the chairman of the board and the people in this company who were trying to do their jobs. And I'm not sure that's over, either.
(Joe II)
As families, companies, and industries change over time, so do the places they inhabit. For much of the century, Lowell served as a commanding symbol of American industrial failure, a monument to the transitory nature of corporate commitment and civic prosperity. The shadows cast over the city by the brittle brick shells of the textile mills were deep and long, softened only a bit by the growth of the region's embryonic electronics industry. But as the wheel of political leadership turned over from one generation to another, so did Lowell's resolve to reverse the course of its own decline. In 1970, this resolve crystallized in a congressional act designating Lowell the nation's first Urban Cultural National Park. Pooling federal dollars and private initiative, the legislative effort led to an ambitious rebuilding program that reclaimed whole chunks of Lowell's rich heritage and put new faces -- both commercial and historical -- on many old mill sites.
Like Lowell, Prince drew upon its history for the wherewithal to move forward. No longer strictly a macaroni company, it continued its course of diversification through acquisition; but pasta remained its principal focus. In one celebrated ad campaign of the late '60s, for instance -- the Clio Award-winning "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day" campaign -- the company cleverly traded on its ethnic Boston roots through the image of Antony, a winsome North End waif who hurries home each Wednesday to the family dinner table. Not only did the message help make Prince a household word, it further illuminated the fractious nature of the industry itself: JP had originally proposed the "Wednesday" slogan for the macaroni manufacturers' trade association. His suspicious -- and contentious -- colleagues rejected it out of hand.
The leadership wheel at Prince turned too. In 1973, JP told his son that he was forwarding his nomination as the company's next president to the board of directors.
The son could not claim to be shocked by the news -- "I always knew I'd wind up running the company if I wasn't a complete idiot," he later commented -- nor was he intimidated by the responsibility that went with it. Yet he had a keen appreciation of the differences between himself and his father, and deep down he brooded about the control issue. Could Prince adapt to a more "professional" style of management, he wondered, and would the old man allow it in the first place? His father was so many things that he was not: volatile, mercurial, instinctive, impulsive, the type of man who cemented lifetime contracts with a handshake and was not above shaking his fist at the sky and begging the gods to "exterminate" his competitors; in short -- and literally -- an immigrant Italian.
Not so the son. He was, he said, "an American, period," both by birthright and by proclivity. A pessimist by nature ("I wake up in the morning, and everything else that happens is gravy"), he fretted over charts and numbers and felt strongly that company growth could be sustained only through sharp decentralization of authority. As a chief executive, he believed in the notion of strong, independent managers running strong, independent company divisions, and in cultivating a group of nonfamily advisers who weren't afraid to second-guess his judgment. As a family man with three growing children of his own, moreover, he made life outside the office a high priority. When he wasn't managing the company, he fished, skied, golfed, antiqued, and went to his sons' hockey games. These were never his father's priorities; for him, the son felt, management was the vocation and crisis management the avocation.
