He credits Smith with setting the style. They are so lean, so mean, they are taking the instrument world by storm. Sassouni points to the centralization of services in Thermo Electron as one of the keys. I've never seen a company crunch those numbers down to one and a quarter percent. It is a very good performance figure compared with the rest of the instrument industry.
People have to learn to work with limited resources.
Indeed, Smith views many other companies as short-sighted in their management. Finnigan MAT is a good example of Smith's management style in action. When the mass spectrometer manufacturer was acquired by Thermo Instrument in 1990, it was stuck in a cycle of two good years followed by a disastrous year, recalls Smith. They couldn't keep their expenditures in line. Rick Chapman, who was a marketing manager when Thermo Instrument purchased the company, remembers that Finnigan's management was shocked when Smith first outlined his five-year goal.