Telling wanted to install a younger group of executives at the top of Sears` corporate structure, and to this end he chose driven, generally youthful men to head each of Sears` major operations. One of them, Edward Brennan, 51, who came out of the merchandise group (the stores), is now president of the corporation; he succeeds Telling this week as CEO.
Telling does not so much run Sears as establish an environment and a plan that enable the company to be run by others. ”Most of my time is spent planning for the time I won`t be here,” he says.
Does this role as overseer isolate Sears` top ruler from the rest of the company?
”It`s a very fine line between becoming overinvolved in the day-to-day
(operations) and losing touch completely,” Telling replies. ”We set goals with the operating groups, agree on those goals and then monitor the results formally, quarterly. So it`s pretty hard to lose touch.”
Just as he is not a familiar face to most of the 400,000 employees of Sears, neither is he to Chicago`s civic organizations. He once served a term on former Mayor Jane Byrne`s Economic Development Commission, but he attended virtually none of its meetings, sending instead a Sears official in charge of community affairs, who then reported back to him. Telling did appear in a national magazine and newspaper advertisement for the commission in which he says, ”If Sears were starting all over again in 1980, Chicago would be a good place to start.”
”I`ve been part of Chicago United (a corporate effort to improve race relations in the city),” Telling says. ”I served on an economic council for Mayor Byrne. Our headquarters are in Chicago, but we`re like English sparrows –we`re everyplace. We owe every hamlet, every city where we are the same amount of attention that we owe Chicago. We have our territorial and the Chicago group offices here. The out-front individual in Chicago, for the good both of Chicago and Sears, Roebuck and Co., should be the head of the Chicago Sears.
”I had seen Sears not being run (well) because people were too busy outside the business,” he says, in an apparent reference to his predecessor, Arthur Wood, who helped launch Chicago United. ”When I took the job, I told the people around me that we`re going to stay home and that we`re going to do this before we do other things.”
Telling has made only six major public addresses during his tenure as chief executive, but his reclusiveness should not be confused with the corporate posture of Sears on matters of public policy that affect the fortunes of the company. Indeed, this distinction is a perfect example of the camouflage phenomenon at work. Though other Sears executives testify frequently before Congress and are a strong lobbying presence, Telling, as chairman of Sears, has testified before Congress only twice, even though the fate of his ambitious plans to expand into banking, real estate and brokerage rests ultimately on the good will of legislators being pressured by insurance companies, small banks and thrift institutions with opposing interests.
When Telling first appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, in June, 1983, he apologized to the legislators. ”I had begun to think–perhaps even to hope–that I would complete my stewardship without an occasion to burden a committee of the Senate with my views,” he said. Other Sears executives described the process of persuading Telling to travel to Washington to testify as ”comparable to pulling teeth.”
Born and raised in Danville, Ill., 130 miles south of Chicago, Telling carries with him today a small-town concern for privacy and a reverence for established order. He returns to his hometown from time to time to visit family and friends. ”It`s a town of about 40,000 people,” says Cole Morton, a first cousin of Telling`s wife and a retired farmer who lives near Danville. ”It`s never grown too much. It used to be a coal town, but there is only one strip-bank mine left. It got too expensive to mine coal here.”
Mary Miller, one of Telling`s English teachers at Danville High School
(she also taught another notable Danville native, Dick Van Dyke), recalls that Telling ”was a lovely student, very athletic. But he was shy. He never was bold. I think that`s what won all the girls to him.”
In 1937 Telling enrolled at Illinois Wesleyan University, a small Methodist school in Bloomington, 80 miles from Danville. He majored in economics, minored in religion and sociology and worked his way through school. ”I waited tables. I had to be at work at 11 o`clock and wasn`t through until 1:30 or so.” ”That usually knocked out my 10 and 11 o`clock classes. The religion courses were all in the afternoon; I found those tremendously interesting.”
Telling left school in 1940 and spent the war years as a Navy pilot, including two as a flight instructor in Pensacola, Fla. Of those wartime years, Telling now says, ”The most vivid recollection I have is the happiness and thrill of getting out (of the service).” He returned immediately to Illinois and graduated from Illinois Wesleyan in the summer of 1946. That fall he joined Sears in Danville as a trainee earning $55 per week.
The company made him a stockroom clerk. He has told reporters that as an older trainee and in accordance with his determination to move ahead, he was
”given pretty good assurances that I wouldn`t stay in that job for long.”
Eight years later, after moving to stores in other small towns, he rose to the position of store manager in Danville. Two months later the store burned to the ground.
To Telling the fire was the most serious crisis of his career. ”I got a call about 7 o`clock in the morning,” he says. ”Of course, I wondered how, why. The care of the physical property has always been a high priority for a Sears store manager. So I remember being happy that the local fire department had just made their annual inspection about two days before and found no violations.”
After surveying what little was left of his store, Telling had to deal with the Sears bureaucracy. ”The first thing I did, naturally, was call Chicago to tell them what had happened. I used (J.C.) Penney`s phone–we had a common wall between the two stores (virtually all of Penney`s stock also was destroyed). We were good friends, always have been. After the fire you could have bought Penney`s inventory for about 20 cents, but the store had no
(structural) damage. It`s kind of comical now. I called for instructions. They said, `Get the fire bulletin out; there`s a bulletin on fires.` I said,
`Well, that`s fine, but it was in the store.`
”The territorial officer in those days was king of his domain,” Telling continues. ”(He) wasn`t prone to give me the money to get back into business, so we did it ourselves. We rented an empty automobile showroom. The store employees were tremendous. We carried the store fixtures down the alley and got ourselves back in business. By the time the other store was rebuilt, we had gone ahead in sales and profits at the little one.”
For almost 25 years after he brought the Danville store back from the ashes, Telling managed increasingly larger sections of Sears–first a store, then a region, then the statewide group in New York.
From Sears old-timers comes the story of how Telling moved the New York group to new headquarters. He had already found the new location and told his executives to prepare the move when Sears real-estate officials from Chicago arrived to tell him they had to approve the new location. Telling, the story goes, then took the standard-issue painting of Gen. Wood off the wall behind his desk, tucked it under his arm and said, ”I`m moving to the new headquarters. If you want to come along, follow me.”
In each post Telling consistently demonstrated such qualities as an eye for cost efficiencies, the ability to establish harmonious relations with subordinates and a streak of ambition that never flared into the flamboyance of power politics. Telling describes his rise through the Sears hierarchy with a simple aphorism, ”Each job at its own time.”
Since the era of Julius Rosenwald, Sears` policy toward customers has been based on a well-advertised pledge, ”Satisfaction guaranteed–or your money back.” Telling stands behind that pledge. When he was a store manager in the 1950s, Telling handled hundreds of customer-related problems himself. As chairman, he says, dozens of complaints cross his desk each week. Twice a year or so, a dissatisfied customer manages to reach him at home in the evening.
”They call and say, `Is your name Telling?`
” `Yes.`
” `Do you work for Sears?`
” `Yes.`
” `Do you run Sears?`
” `Yes.`
”And there`s a huge pause. I say, `Come on, where are you calling from?` ” `Well, I didn`t think I`d get you.`
” `Well, you`ve got me. I don`t want to waste your money. First, give me your name and a phone number where you can be reached because sitting here at 8 o`clock at night, I`m probably not going to solve your problem; you`re just wasting your money.`
”I get the number, get the right people back to them in the morning, and I usually get a nice letter.”
