Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and the Man Who Created It

This is the full-title entry for George Roberts' privately published memoir of Teledyne Corporation and its founder Henry Singleton, the same work catalogued elsewhere in this reference under the shorter title.

Roberts was president of Teledyne and writes from inside the company. The book covers Singleton's founding of Teledyne in 1960, the conglomerate assembly of roughly one hundred and thirty businesses through the 1960s using highly valued Teledyne shares as acquisition currency, the abrupt halt to acquisitions when the share multiple fell, the decentralised operating structure with a very small head office, and the share repurchase programme that retired roughly ninety percent of outstanding shares between 1972 and 1984.

Singleton was a mathematician who had worked on inertial guidance systems before founding the company, and Roberts describes a chief executive who spent very little time on operations and almost all of it on capital allocation, which is the reverse of the normal division and is the reason investors study the record.

The reference has not verified the specific figures and episodes in this account, which is a privately published memoir written by a participant decades after the events. Roberts describes what happened rather than analysing why it worked. The Teledyne chapter in William Thorndike's The Outsiders provides the quantified analysis of the same record and is the better starting point for an investor.