(FORTUNE Magazine) – They chose widely different fields of work and displayed widely different talents. But the achievers elected this year by FORTUNE's board of editors to the U.S. Business Hall of Fame all shared one trait: dogged persistence in managing their companies -- and their careers -- through fat times and lean. Thornton A. Wilson took over a teetering Boeing, reinvigorated it, then steered it yet another time through lean years before retiring on a crest. Robert N. Noyce was a brilliant inventor, but just as important as his genius was his resolve to speed his inventions to market by dramatically reducing their costs. Wallace R. Persons engineered an ambitious program of growth for Emerson Electric, yet he also imbued the company with its zeal for cost control. Marvin Bower took McKinsey & Co. to the top and kept it there, whether the current fad in management called for slow growth from within or rapid expansion by conglomeration. At age 46, Will K. Kellogg looked out at a stale, unprofitable world, and gloomily forecast he would be a poor man forever. A few years later, corn flakes made him rich. And Samuel I. Newhouse, the son of poor immigrants, carried on for half a century his single-minded acquisitions of newspapers. While the economy sometimes faltered, Newhouse never did. Begun in 1975, the U.S. Business Hall of Fame is sponsored by Junior Achievement, the nonprofit organization that seeks to educate young people about how private enterprise works. Each year, at Junior Achievement's request, FORTUNE's board of editors chooses laureates from two broad categories: those who are alive but have left the jobs in which they made their mark and those who are dead. This year's laureates will be inducted March 16 at a banquet in Colorado Springs. For a list of the 114 past laureates, see page 136.

I'M NOT A STRATEGIST. I don't have any grand plan. I'm competitive. I roll with the punches.'' Thus speaks Thornton A. Wilson, for 17 years until 1986 chief executive of the Boeing Co. Almost alone among U.S. industrial companies, Boeing dominates a worldwide industry. It is the leading U.S. exporter after General Motors and Ford, with some 55% of the world market for commercial jet aircraft, and it sits now with a backlog of around 1,100 aircraft on order. Those circumstances give rise to the suspicion that Wilson may incline to modesty. But swift and strong action are also characteristic. Taking over a faltering company in 1969, Wilson immediately administered violent therapy. He slashed 95,000 people from the company payroll, reducing Boeing's work force by almost two-thirds. Nor did Wilson soon thereafter become a likely candidate for mayor of Seattle, where Boeing is the largest employer. For several lean years during the recession of the early 1970s, Wilson kept payrolls slim while profits began their climb. From primacy as a cost cutter to primacy as a riverboat gambler is a long flight, but soon Wilson made the trip. He encouraged Boeing's engineers -- he's one himself and remarks, ''It takes one to know one'' -- to design each new model so that it could spawn new versions in what seemed an endless stream. Wilson says he is proudest of a variation in the wing of the 707: ''It gave us a better performing product and got us big orders.'' The strategy required investments of billions of dollars and patience to wait years for the return. But the spun-off mutant aircraft were produced at low cost by comparison with entirely new planes. Explains Wilson: ''A new version of an old product line is hard to beat with an entirely new aircraft. You have to have a 20% improvement. The cost of engineering and tooling is more on the new plane, and meanwhile the old version is being improved too.'' Successfully marketed changes within the same family of planes enabled Boeing to offer aircraft right for any range. That capacity, in effect proffering to the big airlines that are Boeing's primary customers the advantages of one- stop shopping, still gives Boeing an edge over McDonnell Douglas, its leading American competitor, and over Airbus Industrie, the subsidized foreign entry in the field. Over the years the 700 series supplied the power for Boeing's earnings. Its profits of $51 million in 1973 were five times those of 1969. And in 1979, earnings touched $505 million. They dropped again during the recession of 1981-83, giving Wilson a chance to revert to type as a cost cutter, although he says now that ''the recession of 1970 was so bad that I can't remember the one in 1981.'' Then earnings took off once more. They stood at $566 million in 1985, Wilson's final year as Boeing's chief pilot. ( Big decisions in Boeing's line of work perdure as in no other. Time's trial of them can last 25 years. At this reading, the decisions of the man who proclaims himself ''not a strategist,'' but who loves to solve games of logic, look good enough to pass that rugged test. A Missouri-born farm boy who saw his father lose the family farm, Wilson remarks, ''I had an older brother and very loving parents. I was a happy little bastard.'' He ruled Boeing with the same candor. A longtime associate once remarked, ''When T. gets through talking to you, you don't walk away wondering what he meant.'' Wilson makes no modest disclaimers: ''I was a demanding and tough manager. I was no joy to behold. You have to kick some people around and remove people. You don't hesitate. You do it.'' When Wilson was served vichyssoise for the first time in his life, he told the waiter, ''Hell, this soup is cold.'' Never did a country boy -- in part geniune, in part affected -- play for bigger stakes with more success. BRILLIANT INVENTORS who can move with distinction in the world of business are a rarity, even in the history of computer science. First among these achievers is Robert N. Noyce, who played a vital role in founding two huge companies, principally to bring his inventions successfully to the marketplace. ''A lot of things are technologically possible,'' Noyce once remarked, ''but only economically feasible products will become a reality . . . Where costs can be pushed down rapidly, great new vistas arise.'' A young Ph.D. from MIT, Noyce expanded his own vistas when he went west to Silicon Valley to join some associates in the race to develop the integrated circuit. In 1957, Noyce and a group of colleagues, including Gordon E. Moore, pooled their mindpower to start Fairchild Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Fairchild Camera & Instrument. On that vehicle they rode to market a triumphant invention, the microchip. Noyce's design was the first to propose the use of silicon, which immediately set the standard for the industry. Fairchild Semiconductor's reputation spread, and NASA chose it to make chips for the on-board computers in the Gemini spacecraft a couple of years later. Within ten years of its founding, the company had $130 million in annual revenues. While Noyce the inventor was gratified, Noyce the businessman was frustrated by the length of time it took Fairchild Camera to bring his inventions to market on a big scale. Further, Noyce says today, ''I was trying to have the freedom to go off and do something different.'' He and Moore left Fairchild in 1968 to found their second corporation, Intel. There they hired so many Ph.D.s that Noyce had to insist the word ''doctor'' not be used when people were paged: The office was beginning to sound too much like a hospital. In 1968, Intel's gross revenues were $2,672. Noyce's aim at Intel was to build a great thing, the company, atop a tiny one, the silicon chip. The breakthrough, which came after a year of nail- biting -- ''We resented having to sleep,'' a colleague recalls -- was one of those treasured moments when costs could be ''pushed down rapidly.'' The ambitious objective, says Noyce, ''was to get the price of memory down by a factor of 100.'' After that accomplishment, Intel became a high-capacity producer of one generation of memories after another, including the first dynamic RAM. From the company they poured out -- memories, memories. When the Japanese turned memory chips into a commodity, Intel had a couple of tough years. But the company was saved again by invention: It developed the microprocessor that powers personal computers. By its 15th birthday in 1983, Intel's revenues exceeded $1 billion; in 1988 they approached $3 billion, and profits rose to $453 million. Imaginative as he is, Noyce remarks that he could never have forecast what has happened to the semiconductor market. ''I never knew it would be like this,'' he says. ''It's very gratifying to see the impact that the semiconductor has made on our society.'' He is now in Austin, Texas, as head of Sematech, a research consortium of major U.S. semiconductor manufacturers. Its purpose: to strengthen the U.S. semiconductor industry for the competition yet to come. And Noyce is still working under pressure: ''In five months we are expected to do what we did at Intel in five years.'' But what took five years seems, in retrospect, quite worth the time and trouble. A TAUT, TOTALLY committed executive, Wallace R. Persons once declared that ''the game of business is so fascinating that most executives don't care very much about anything else.'' In the same spirit of candor, he also announced that he never took his wife along on business trips because he didn't want to have to fit ''anyone else's whims'' into his tight schedule, which he described as ''not fun, but of consuming interest.'' When not on the road Persons habitually lunched in his office, taking on fuel like a bomber in midflight. - Such intensity enabled Persons, who is called Buck, to take Emerson Electric from obscurity as a manufacturer of fans and small electric motors to technological and managerial preeminence. When he retired in 1974 after 20 years as chief executive, Emerson's revenues exceeded $1 billion. Far more significant, earnings set new records in each of the last 15 years of Persons' tenure, which included four major recessions. ''When we started, our little corporation was kind of broke,'' Persons recalls today. Persons found a couple of mentors who helped out. He was an admirer of Charles F. Kettering, G.M.'s technical genius and a 1982 Hall of Fame laureate, and he took Kettering's metaphorical advice ''to get off Route 25, young man'' -- meaning to travel unexpected paths toward corporate objectives. Peter Drucker's Practice of Management, Persons says, ''also made a great impression.'' The sum of all that was Persons's decision to launch Emerson on an acquisition program of a special kind. ''Conglomeration was a fad then,'' remembers Persons. ''I recognized the growth potential, but decided we would move slowly, pick up one good company a year, and live with it. Later the big conglomerates would spit out misfits. I was determined not to lose a single company.'' Emerson's earnings records also eased the process of acquisition. Wall Street gave the company a high price/earnings ratio -- in many years 30 to 1 -- enabling Persons to buy a flock of smaller companies with Emerson stock. Persons's caution redoubled in recession years. At the first recessionary signals, he set cost reduction goals, and the company met every one. In none of the recessions did Persons have to slash very deeply into the payroll. Careful budgeting -- lean inventories, inventive designs, shifts to cheaper materials -- did the job. Such care may have an old-fashioned ring about it, but Persons was also a forerunner of the present. Perceiving that executives had a social role to play, he served in the 1960s as president of Civic Progress, an alliance between businessmen and politicians in St. Louis. ''If you want first-class people, you have to have a first-class place for them to live,'' he said. And Persons rejected the obsession with quarter-to-quarter earnings gains, which sometimes ends in the gift of a weakened corporate structure to those who follow. He left Emerson, now a manufacturer of a wide range of electronic products and small motors, well positioned for his successor, Charles F. Knight Jr. Always an accomplished and enthusiastic athlete, Persons still shoots a good round of golf and plays what he calls ''nonphilosophical'' poker. Relaxing was harder when he ran Emerson Electric and habitually went home at 6:30 P.M. ''with a few things to think about.'' He often took the ''few things'' to bed with him and, after thinking them over in silence, made his big decisions. There's a lesson for today's managers. FEW AMERICAN corporations reach FORTUNE's 500 list without meeting McKinsey & Co. along the way. The prime mover of that premier firm is Marvin Bower, a founder of modern management consulting, who brought McKinsey to New York from the Midwest 50 years ago and then took the company to the major cities of the world -- everywhere finding a market for the wide range of consulting services that became McKinsey's trademark. A master salesman and a master craftsman, Bower made shrewd assessments of the needs of the country's principal executives, with a keen eye to the boss's insecurities. Throughout his career, Bower has always emphasized the importance of finding young talent, looking, as he puts it expansively, ''for outstanding character, intellect, responsibility, initiative, and imagination.'' Adds Bower: ''When you are doing something in an intangible field -- we have a few old desks and people, basically -- you have to keep motivating people.'' Bower's method, still followed at McKinsey, was to hire graduates directly out of business school and encourage them to perform like entrepreneurs, with compensation to match. To that incentive he added the ''up or out'' policy: Either become a partner at McKinsey, which remains a private corporation, in six or seven years, or take your talents elsewhere. Over the years, American business has traveled through fashionable waves of new managerial philosophies. Through the attraction of growth from within, past the era of conglomeration and asset management, Bower kept a steady eye on the fundamentals. ''The old divisional approach'' has always been McKinsey's guiding principle, Bower says. And McKinsey has profited in each era, Bower adds, because ''this is not a boutique of specialists . . . Business is a total enterprise. Consultants must be able to tell managers what the people inside won't tell them.'' Like other consultants, McKinsey is secretive about its clients and the nature of the work it does for them. But among the clients have been giants, ! at home and abroad. And the firm's influence extends beyond even that scope. McKinsey has not only reaped but sown, as thousands of its former partners have left the firm to take executive jobs all over the world. At McKinsey, Bower both advised others about how to manage growth and managed it himself. McKinsey's yearly billings went from $2 million when he became managing director in 1950 to ten times that amount when he stepped down in 1967. Building on Bower's base, the firm now bills in excess of $600 million a year. For years Bower imposed a dress code not unlike the one Tom Watson laid down at IBM, insisting that professionals wear hats to work. But one day he came to work bareheaded. A new arrival asked an old hand whether everyone was therefore free to do the same. The response showed the respect with which people at McKinsey still regard the old fox. ''Better wait six weeks,'' was the reply. ''It might be a trap.''

ROSTER OF PAST LAUREATES

WILLIAM M. ALLEN ROBERT O. ANDERSON

LEO H. BAEKELAND WILLIAM M. BATTEN STEPHEN D. BECHTEL SR. ARNOLD O. BECKMAN OLIVE ANN BEECH WILLIAM BLACKIE WILLIAM E. BOEING

EDWARD E. CARLSON ANDREW CARNEGIE WILLIS H. CARRIER WALTER P. CHRYSLER FREDERICK C. CRAWFORD TRAMMELL CROW HARRY B. CUNNINGHAM

ARTHUR VINING DAVIS JOHN DEERE WALT DISNEY GEORGES F. DORIOT DONALD W. DOUGLAS PIERRE S. DU PONT

GEORGE EASTMAN THOMAS A. EDISON

CYRUS W. FIELD HARVEY S. FIRESTONE HENRY M. FLAGLER HENRY FORD BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

ROSWELL GARST A. P. GIANNINI KING C. GILLETTE LEONARD H. GOLDENSON BENJAMIN GRAHAM FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE GRAHAM

WALTER A. HAAS GEORGE H. HALAS JOYCE C. HALL EDWARD H. HARRIMAN H. J. HEINZ MILTON S. HERSHEY WILLIAM R. HEWLETT JAMES J. HILL CONRAD N. HILTON

EDWARD C. JOHNSON II REGINALD H. JONES J. ERIK JONSSON

HENRY J. KAISER DONALD M. KENDALL CHARLES F. KETTERING BERNARD KILGORE ROBERT J. KLEBERG SR. RAY KROC

ALDEN J. LABORDE EDWIN H. LAND WILLIAM F. LAPORTE

ALBERT D. LASKER ESTEE LAUDER ROYAL LITTLE FRANCIS CABOT LOWELL HENRY R. LUCE

IAN K. MACGREGOR JOHN J. MCCLOY CYRUS H. MCCORMICK MALCOM P. MCLEAN RENE C. MCPHERSON FORREST MARS JACK C. MASSEY GEORGE J. MECHERLE ANDREW W. MELLON CHARLES E. MERRILL J. IRWIN MILLER GEORGE S. MOORE J. PIERPONT MORGAN HOWARD J. MORGENS

ADOLPH S. OCHS DAVID M. OGILVY

DAVID PACKARD WILLIAM S. PALEY JOHN H. PATTERSON WILLIAM A. PATTERSON J. C. PENNEY H. ROSS PEROT ABE PLOUGH WILLIAM COOPER PROCTER

SIMON RAMO M. J. RATHBONE DONALD T. REGAN JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JAMES W. ROUSE

DAVID SARNOFF JACOB H. SCHIFF CHARLES M. SCHWAB IGOR I. SIKORSKY ALFRED P. SLOAN JR. C. R. SMITH CHARLES C. SPAULDING ALEXANDER T. STEWART JOHN E. SWEARINGEN JR.

J. EDGAR THOMSON

THEODORE N. VAIL CORNELIUS VANDERBILT

DEWITT WALLACE LILA ACHESON WALLACE GEORGE WASHINGTON THOMAS J. WATSON JR. GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE FREDERICK WEYERHAEUSER ELI WHITNEY C. KEMMONS WILSON JOSEPH C. WILSON ROBERT E. WOOD ROBERT W. WOODRUFF

OWEN D YOUNG