How Anders Went From Apollo 8 to General Dynamics’ Most Famous Sale

Euromoney, June 2015

Front End 

Those who are pondering life after banking might be puzzled about the way forward. How to adapt to a change of pace, of status, of money? 

Well, they’re not alone. Last month Euromoney’s Middle East editor Chris Wright turned his attention away from bankers to launch a book looking at life after an iconic moment: moving on despite knowing you will only ever be remembered for one thing.

No More Worlds to Conquer talks to moonwalking Apollo astronauts, record-breaking Olympians and former hostages about getting on with life despite knowing the opening line of your obituary is already pretty clear. Interviewees include Nadia Comaneci, the gymnast; Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier; five Apollo veterans; former Lebanon hostage John McCarthy; and a host of others ranging from a member of the 1966 World Cup winning England side who became a Huddersfield undertaker, to the crew of the notorious United 232 plane crash.

It’s quite a diversion from Chris’s usual diet of sovereign wealth funds, Islamic finance, emerging debt capital markets and the like, but there are moments where the two worlds intersect. Bill Anders, on the crew of Apollo 8 – the first craft to leave Earth’s orbit and travel to the moon, orbiting it 10 times in 1968, during which time he took the famous Earthrise photo that is used as the book’s cover – went on to become CEO of General Dynamics. His no-matter-what commitment to shareholder value, including selling the company’s most prized division to a direct rival, was so successful (for shareholders, anyway) that there is a Harvard case study on it.

He tells Euromoney that the deal wasn’t meant to come out that way. After a host of divestments General Dynamics was cash-rich, and since fighter planes had become its core division, Anders went to see Lockheed chairman Daniel Tellup to offer to buy the equivalent business there, the one informally known as Skunk Works.

“I was lusting after it,” he remembers. “If you own the Skunk Works, your you-know-what grew in that industry. I wasn’t totally immune to big is better.”

At the end of his pitch, Tellup told him: “Bill, that was a hell of a good idea. We gotta do that. We’ll accept, with one little exception.”

What’s that, Anders asked? “I won’t sell, but I’ll buy you.”

Anders recalls, “I thought: shit.”

But, true to his principles, he said he’d sell if the price was right. He asked the experts on his staff what the business was really worth, multiplied it by 1.5, and put it to Lockheed, who paid $1.5 billion for it in 1993. Shareholders during Anders’s three-year tenure ended up with six times the money they’d started with.

No More Worlds to Conquer is published by The Friday Project, a HarperCollins imprint