#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

0:00Henry Singleton was a remarkable man with an unusual background for a CEO.

0:04A world-class mathematician who enjoyed playing chess blindfolded, he had programmed MIT's first computer while earning a doctorate in electrical engineering.

0:12During World War II, he developed technology that allowed Allied ships to avoid radar detection, and in the 1950s, he created a guidance system that is still in use in most military and commercial aircraft.

0:22All of that before he founded the conglomerate Teledyne in the early 1960s and became one of history's greatest CEOs.

0:29Conglomerates were the internet stocks of the 1960s.

0:32A large number of them went public.

0:34Singleton, however, ran a very unusual conglomerate.

0:38Long before it became popular, he aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying over 90% of Teledyne's shares.

0:45That's nuts.

0:46He avoided dividends, emphasized cash flow over reported earnings, ran a famously decentralized organization, and never split the company's stock.

0:55He was known as the Sphinx for his reluctance to speak with either analysts or journalists.