(FORTUNE Magazine) – THERE IS FANTASY, and then there is vision, and Nolan Archibald has pursued both in his 45 achievement-obsessed years. His dream of playing basketball in the NBA turned out to be fantasy, though he did make it to tryouts with the Chicago Bulls. On the other hand, his post-locker room goal of becoming the boy wonder CEO of a FORTUNE 500 company -- rushing in to turn it around, freeing it from the choking hands of Japanese competition and its own bumbling management -- has proved to be vision. Perhaps the only difference is that one came true and the other didn't, but everyone working for Archibald these days in the executive offices of rejuvenated Black & Decker Corp. refers routinely to the ''vision,'' as in ''I joined the team to pursue a vision,'' or ''We have to act on the vision.'' Like many others on lofty corporate perches, Archibald holds the requisite Harvard MBA and full-speed-ahead resume. But before all that, he learned much of vision and persuasion and turnaround as a youth traveling the American South for two years, seeking converts to his Mormon faith. Today he still summons a palpable missionary's zeal to such decidedly secular tasks as marketing cordless screwdrivers or irons that shut off automatically -- whatever it takes to realize the vision: Black & Decker as global marketing powerhouse. The most startling element of Black & Decker's turnaround has been the speed with which Archibald transformed an entire corporate culture, replacing a complacent manufacturing mentality with an almost manic, market-driven way of doing things. Just after arriving in 1985, he bit a cold, hard bullet in the form of a $215 million write-off for restructuring. He's kept sales and earnings climbing steadily since. Recently the company reported a 75% increase in annual earnings, to almost $100 million, on sales of $2.3 billion. After five straight years of losing share to Makita of Japan, Bosch of West Germany, and Emerson Electric's Skil, Black & Decker's power tool business is now the fastest-growing in the industry -- up, the company says, about 20% in the U.S., vs. overall market growth of around 9% a year. Archibald dismisses any suggestion of managerial legerdemain. ''These are not magical things we've done, not quick-fix solutions,'' he says. ''I am a marketing guy and an operating guy, not a turnaround artist. What we've done shows that you can compete with foreign competition, whether it's Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or European. If there are lessons here, they are in the common, basic things that need to be done.'' (Stay tuned for Nolan Archibald's very own three-step turnaround recipe.) Perhaps more important, even, than the numbers has been Archibald's conversion of Black & Decker's skeptical, often angry, customers to his vision. ''It got to the point where you couldn't give away some of their products,'' says Steve Simony, general manager of Dixie Construction Products, a big Atlanta wholesale distributor of professional tools to the construction industry. ''Their product line had no continuity, and their tools didn't hold up.'' Archibald pledged improvement. ''We were doubters at first,'' says Simony, ''but we've become believers. They put out a quality product, and their service has improved to acceptable. With us, Black & Decker has gone from being No. 3 and going backward to No. 1 and going straight up.'' Competitors also have taken note. ''Yes,'' says Harry Suzuki, corporate vice president of Makita U.S.A., when asked if Archibald has made a difference. ''They are getting the industrial professional tool market back by restructuring their organization.''

On the household appliance side, Archibald was displeased with what he had inherited: the General Electric line of small appliances -- coffeemakers, toasters, irons -- that Black & Decker had just purchased. He thought his new outfit had overpaid for a bunch of dated products without getting the most valuable part of the business -- the GE name. But Archibald went ahead to spend $100 million advertising what at the time was the largest renaming of a consumer brand in history, pushed for new products, and invested heavily in inventory to make sure that customers received their orders. The shift of flags is now complete, Black & Decker has retained market leadership, and, again, skeptical retailers have become converts. ''We expected them to go down the toilet, but it never happened,'' says Jerry Peluso, director of merchandising at Best Products Inc. in Richmond. ''The changeover was executed ahead of time and very professionally done.'' Archibald was only 42 when he was hired from Beatrice Cos. as president and chief operating officer of the struggling Towson, Maryland, company. Ferd Nadherny, the headhunter at Russell Reynolds Associates who recruited him, recalls that the 6-foot 5-inch father of eight had only one reservation when offered the job: ''He wanted to be the CEO, and it didn't look like that was going to happen for maybe four years,'' says Nadherny. ''He took the job anyway, and was CEO in six months.'' Archibald has climbed to the top mostly on the steep side of the mountain. He began his career as a marketer for Conroy Inc., a recreation products company in Texas, where he was charged with turning around the snowmobile business. Beatrice recruited him to its Airstream subsidiary. Then he turned around the conglomerate's Del Mar window covering unit. Eventually he became president of Beatrice's consumer durables group, a $1.7-billion-a-year behemoth that produced everything from Samsonite luggage to Culligan water treatment systems. Says Nadherny: ''This guy had potential and leadership written all over him. He reeked of leadership.'' So, Coach Archibald, take a break from the action and tell us, how did you turn your newest team around? The Black & Decker CEO has thought about it, and he's glad we asked. Here, then, is his three-step plan for reviving an ailing U.S. manufacturing company beset by vicious foreign competition in what appears to be a hopelessly mature industry. On second thought, check that last attitude at the door; a favorite Archibald truism is that there are no mature markets, only mature managements. Step No. 1: The Plan. ''I really believe in strategic thinking,'' he says. ''You analyze the problems that are unique to the company and the industry and determine what the strengths and weaknesses are. Then you develop a plan to leverage the strengths and correct the weaknesses, and you communicate that plan and get everybody to believe in it.'' In this case, the crucial element was a worldwide product strategy. Black & Decker engineers learned to act Japanese; they tore apart Makita tools and analyzed them. They replaced ''just in case'' production methods with ''just in time'' continuous flow methods. The plan addressed costs, marketing, products, customer relations, and competitive advantage. THE SHOCK that such thinking sent through Black & Decker's hardened arteries is best understood against some history. When Archibald was elevated to CEO, he became only the third man to run the company who wasn't named Black or Decker. From the time that Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker started their Baltimore machine shop in 1910, the Black & Decker Corp. had grown large and international. But its corporate structure remained a confederation of nearly sovereign fiefdoms. British managers developed and sold their own products in Britain, as did their French and German counterparts, without any regard to global strategy. The tremendous overhead wasn't offset by any efficiencies or economies of scale. Worldwide, the company made 100 different motors -- the most expensive component of power tools. Today, after a bit of Archibaldian rationalization, it makes fewer than 20 and is aiming for five. In the U.S., power tools were separated into two categories, each with its own factories: high-priced professional and low-cost consumer. In a classic ''it's not my job'' attitude, neither group took responsibility for a rapidly growing market segment: mid-priced tools for discerning do-it-your- selfers and budget-minded semiprofessionals. It didn't take long for Makita to drill out that niche of the market. Archibald abolished the geographical fiefdoms and called for developing products that could be sold the world over. He exhorted his own employees to act on the strategy and begged customers who were threatening defection to believe. STEP NO. 2: The People. ''I believe in putting the best possible talent around me,'' says Archibald. ''You've got to be able to spot it, you've got to be able to recruit it, you've got to be able to retain it, and you've got to be able to develop it.'' This is turnaround talk for ''Fire the old guys and bring in a new team'' -- most of them around 45 years old and many of them former colleagues from Beatrice. Archibald's most important hire, though, was from Black & Decker's competition. He spent weeks persuading George Sherman, now 47, to defect from his job as head of Emerson Electric's Skil division to direct Black & Decker's power tool business. ''George turned me down several times,'' says Archibald. ''He said he wasn't interested in working for a second-rate company. I just kept after him until I wore him down, and he eventually saw the vision of what this company could become.'' Sherman, an engineer and an MBA, is possibly more driven, even, than Archibald. He has supervised a complete overhaul of the company's power tool business, from marketing and sales to product quality and factory redesign. In two years he has introduced 60 new or redesigned products, most of them in the industry's fastest-growing segment, cordless tools. By 1991, he says, such tools will account for half the company's power tool sales. This quick product development was possible, says Sherman, because Black & Decker's capabilities in manufacturing, engineering, and research and development were already excellent; they weren't used properly for lack of a coherent business plan. Now company engineers can push a technology -- say, lead acid battery packs -- to the limit because it will be used to launch a worldwide line of cordless tools. A new product such as the Air Station home compressor can easily be put into production alongside drills and saws at a plant that has been converted from one making only domestic consumer power tools to one designed around three assembly lines; thus, any product using one of three motor sizes can be made there. ''We're taking a mature industry and growing the hell out of it,'' Sherman says with childlike excitement. ''Guess what, Makita. Guess what, Skil. We're growing in every channel of distribution.'' To challenge Makita's vastly superior reputation in fine woodworking tools, Black & Decker bought Elu Machines of Switzerland. And in a particularly aggressive move, Sherman negotiated a partnership with Shin Daiwa Kogyo Co., an outdoor products and tool company, to distribute Black & Decker products in the Japanese domestic market dominated by Hitachi and Makita. ''Three years ago we were selling the vision but no results,'' says Sherman. ''Today we're selling reality.'' Over in household products -- a business so unglamorous that it has been characterized as the world's largest garage sale -- the vision is equally strong. People are just as worked up over irons and coffeemakers as Sherman's bunch is over cordless power ratchets and angle grinders. ''I came to this company to join a vision,'' says Dennis Heiner, president of that group -- also 45, also a Mormon, also a Beatrice alum, also, like Archibald, a graduate of Weber State College in Utah, and, like all of management at this company, a very intense fellow. ''This year 40% of our sales came from products three years old or less,'' he says, explaining that the way to sell a product as mature as an iron is to add something like an automatic shut-off feature. Kitchen appliances need award-winning design, and, yes, Heiner's new Spacemaker Plus line, which resembles a Danish stereo, just won an Industrial Designers Society of America award. Blenders become cordless; Dustbusters get more powerful. Why is Black & Decker having such success under a bunch of former managers from Beatrice, that notorious supernova of conglomerates? William Stevens, 46, executive vice president of Black & Decker and another former Beatrice executive, has a theory: ''Beatrice made a lot of acquisitions and needed management. So they afforded you the opportunity to run something early. You had profit center responsibility with very little support, and you were measured by that profit and loss statement.'' The new Black & Decker culture clearly impresses the few outsiders who have become key players in it without serving at Beatrice. Listen to Ken Homa, Heiner's 40-year-old vice president of marketing at household products, a GE man who chose to stay on as one of the architects of the shift of brands. ''I find it an extraordinarily rich environment for somebody who's aggressive and requires some autonomy,'' he says. ''It's as pure a meritocracy as I've seen in American business. If you produce, you're rewarded. If you're along for the ride, you're filtered out.'' Step No. 3: Tough Decisions. Archibald closed five plants -- including the company's mother-church factory in Hampstead, Maryland -- putting over 2,000 workers out of jobs, and rolled back wages at others. ''We did a lot of very tough things that this company had never done before,'' he says. ''I remember telling people in North Carolina that we either had to make the plants cost- competitive or shut them down, and so we were going to roll back their wages 10% to 15%. These people weren't thrilled about that.'' Note: Step No. 3 is much easier to accomplish if, like Black & Decker, the turnaround target is largely non-union. That, then, is Archibald's recipe: the right plan, the right people, and tough decisions. But before giving the daring young man of power tools a Lee Iacocca frog-to-prince award -- or, perhaps more important, before trying the recipe yourself -- a few provisos are in order. The turnaround was made easier because some underlying strengths offset Black & Decker's operating problems. Biggest in the plus column: the incalculable magic of the Black & Decker name. Beginning in 1917, when it got a patent on the world's first portable power drill with pistol grip and trigger switch, Black & Decker virtually invented an industry. Its name soon became synonymous with everything associated, however distantly, with power tools. In Britain, for example, do-it-yourself remodelers are said to be ''Black & Deckering'' their homes. In France, someone who is ''plugged in'' to the social scene is said to be ''tres Black et Decker.'' In the U.S., an overly serious college student, formerly a ''grind'' or a ''tool,'' is now known on many campuses as a ''Black & Decker.'' When astronauts made holes in the moon, they used a Black & Decker drill. For all the problems when Archibald arrived, the brand still had tremendous trademark equity with consumers, making a rebound less formidable than, say, what Iacocca faced with the Plymouth line. STILL, no one should get the impression that Archibald is gloating, or that he considers his work finished. Black & Decker will continue to buy line , extensions and to bring more brand names to the fragmented $1 billion power- tool accessory business, with products such as Piranha saw blades and Bullet drill bits. Archibald also acknowledges that he still smarts from his failed attempt to take over American Standard Inc., the big manufacturing outfit, earlier this year. He strongly defends the thinking behind his move: ''It was a high- margin, undermanaged industry, many of whose products are distributed through outlets we sell to,'' he says, explaining that he could have dismantled and sold much of the company and thus obtained the plumbing products business he really wanted -- for free. He remains on the prowl for a ''third leg,'' and possibly a fourth, for Black & Decker, probably sticking with products used around the home that also have commercial applications. It's not at all clear in this era of the F. Ross Johnson sell-the-farm mentality that the American business system, particularly Wall Street, encourages what Archibald and his market-driven, attention-to-detail operating colleagues are doing at Black & Decker. The market is likely to greet a major acquisition, for example, with an ''I love it because it's a strategic fit; I hate it because it's going to kill earnings'' reaction. It is clear, though, that Nolan Archibald, George Sherman, Dennis Heiner, Ken Homa, and William Stevens won't stand for anything that hints of stagnation. This is a team of smart, proven, driven, aggressive marketers who probably have more rein, at their age, than any group of corporate executives anywhere. They also probably enjoy what they're doing as much as anyone in business today. Even if it is only drills and toasters, they all share Nolan Archibald's vision. And for as long as the honeymoon lasts, they're living out his fantasy.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: INVESTOR'S SNAPSHOT BLACK & DECKER