The sad collapse of a corporate titan

Westinghouse was a legendary company that fell into the hands of mismanagers

Can you shed a tear for a corporation that messes up? I can. Itwas known, after its logo, as “The Flying Bar W.” It was the emblematic “can do” company: creative and confident in its engineering, sagacious in its marketing, aggressive politically and not afraid of a scrap.

It was Westinghouse, and it traced its lineage to George Westinghouse, the man who invented the air brake that, with modifications, still stops railway trains and big trucks. He also warred with Thomas Edison and proved to be right in backing Nicola Tesla’s alternating current over Edison’s direct current.

Now, after an ignominious bankruptcy, the company has been sold by its last owner, Toshiba, to a Canadian asset management firm, Brookfield Business Partners.

Westinghouse has had its ups and downs. I was lucky enough to know its executives and to cover the company when it was on a winning streak under the chairmanship of Robert Kirby.

Westinghouse was a sluggish but still prosperous operation when Kirby took over in 1975. He sold off unprofitable divisions and concentrated on its core power generation business, especially nuclear. “I have had to sell businesses that would have made an individual rich,” Kirby told me.

The world nuclear industry owes much to Westinghouse, long headquartered in Monroeville. It was a technology driver. Nearly every light water reactor design was influenced by Westinghouse. The envied French nuclear electric system relies partly on Westinghouse designs.

Poor management — including an excursion into television — hurt the power business, as did the long hiatus in domestic ordering of nuclearplants.

The proximate cause of the economic collapse of Westinghouse are two ambitious reactor projects: V.C. Summer and Vogtle nuclear plants in South Carolina and Georgia. There were multiple mistakes suggesting a lack of managerial depth, both at Westinghouse and Toshiba, which bought the battered Westinghouse power business from BNFL for $5.4 billion in 2006, and probably over paid.

Then there was a new reactor design that was yet to be deployed in the United States (Westinghouse 1000) and the deteriorated nuclear supply chain — no reactor had been built in the country in 20 years. But, sources tell me, the critical mistake was fixed-price contracting. This had been a nono from the early days of nuclear power: Too much can go wrong and often has. It did again.

Maybe its new owners will let Westing house lead again.