It was July 2, 1962, when Jake Bussolini first walked through the doors of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation as their newest electrical engineer. As he was escorted to a plain gray desk that resembled the hundreds of other desks that cluttered the third floor, Bussolini never dreamed that over the next thirty-two years, he would not only help design and build the Lunar Module that delivered astronauts to the moon, but also climb the corporate ladder to become an integral part of an assignment that would lead Grumman in a startlingly different direction.
As he leads others behind closed doors of both executive offices and the corporate board room during challenging times in the defense industry in the early 1990s, Bussolini discloses never-before-revealed details about how a friendly merger created to survive budget cuts slowly transformed into a hostile acquisition. While describing the tense events before, during, and after the acquisition, Bussolini divulges how activities initiated by an investment banker minutes before a final decision was to be made by the Board of Directors to approve the merger changed the course of the company’s history, and the lives of its loyal employees forever.
The Last Chapter shares the fascinating inside story of the 1994 acquisition of Grumman from a former company executive determined to document the final chapter in the history of a great corporation.
