John Barth

Chairman and chief executive officer, Johnson Controls

Nationality: American.

Born: 1946.

Education: Gannon College, BS, 1977.

Career: Johnson Controls, 1969–?, industrial engineer; ?–1990, head of plastics group; 1990–1992, head of automotive business; 1992–1998, executive vice president; 1998–2002, president and COO; 2002–2004, CEO; 2004–, chairman and CEO.

Address: Johnson Controls, 5757 North Green Bay Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53209-4408; http://www.jci.com.

John M. Barth embodied the success story of the loyal, long-term employee who worked his way to the top of a company. In its 117 years Johnson Controls had only six chief executives; Barth was hand groomed for the job by the well-liked chief who preceded him, James Keyes, who stayed on as chairman for another three years after stepping down as CEO. Barth's challenge would not be to turn his company around; in fact, Johnson Controls was an unequivocal leader in its industry. Rather, Barth needed to find a way to sustain the momentum and success that had already been instilled at the company by his predecessors. Adding a warm, personal approach to the executive role, he both met that challenge and created his own legacy to match those of previous CEOs. By 2004 Johnson Controls had enjoyed its 29th consecutive year of earnings growth while also advancing its visibility as an involved and responsible corporate citizen.

As of 2004 Johnson Controls, Wisconsin's largest company, employed over 118,000 persons worldwide. Founded in 1885, the firm began as a producer of electric room thermostats, later expanding its inventory to include other energy and security products and services for buildings. Later entering the automotive-supplier market, Johnson manufactured and marketed batteries and seats, eventually becoming a leading producer of interiors and electronics for new vehicles.

A Loyal Employee

Born in 1946, Barth joined Johnson Controls just a few years after his completion of schooling at Carnegie Tech. His first position with the company was as an industrial engineer in 1969. He later returned to school, earning his bachelor's degree from Gannon College in 1977. Loyal and committed to the success of the company, he served in a variety of operating management positions over the next 15 years, heading Johnson's plastics group and, starting in 1990, its automotive business in Michigan.

Barth's technical skills and management abilities assured him of continued success; also of key importance was his close relationship with the former CEO James Keyes, who had joined the company two years before Barth. The two worked together for many years, predating Keyes's own promotion to CEO in 1988. They shared corporate philosophies and objectives and jointly trained several other managers for higher positions.

During Keyes's tenure as chief executive officer Barth was elected executive vice president in 1992, then became president and chief operating officer in 1998. He held those positions through 2002, at which time he took over for Keyes as CEO. When Keyes finally retired from his duties as chairman in 2004, Barth was named to head the company's board.

An Outstanding Corporate Citizen

When Johnson's board of directors announced Barth's election in July 2002, Keyes stated in a company press release, "John Barth and I have worked together for 17 years, and I am confident that he will strengthen Johnson Controls' commitment to our customers and our shareholders, as well as our employees, our suppliers, and our communities" (July 24, 2002, http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT= 105&STORY=/www/story/07-24-2002/0001770789). True to his commitment, Barth continued Johnson's legacy of success while also keeping the company visible in social and civic communities.

During Barth's term of leadership, Johnson Controls became the only company to twice win the Management Excellence Award—in 2002 and 2003—bestowed by Robert W. Baird & Company and the Executive MBA Alumni Association at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The company was honored as Corporation of the Year in 2003 by the National Minority Supplier Development Council. The award represented the highest recognition a corporation could receive for conducting business with minority- and women-owned firms. In 2004 Barth was named chairman of that council.

With Barth at the helm, Johnson Controls became the only automotive-parts supplier to make BusinessWeek's Top 50 Performers list in 2004. Barth told the magazine that he considered customer relations to be the job of every employee. He also stated that in order for a company to improve its bottom line, the company had to focus on helping its customers improve their bottom lines. Also in 2004 the World Environment Center selected Johnson Controls for its Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development. Elsewhere Barth committed a hefty company contribution toward the creation of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Barth had endeared himself to the community before: In 2003, five days after the 77th annual Milwaukee Holiday Parade was canceled due to a lack of financial support, Barth heard the news on the radio while getting out of the shower. He and his wife had just relocated to downtown Milwaukee from the Detroit area; realizing what a tradition the parade had become for the community, Barth hurriedly gathered a number of corporate managers. Later, from the company's downtown lobby—with a choir of boys and girls singing Christmas carols behind him—Barth announced that Johnson Controls would rescue the parade, which would go on as planned. Yes, Virginia, Santa was alive and well—and living in Milwaukee.

Sources for Further Information

Content, Thomas, "Executive to Become CEO at Glendale, Wis.–Based Auto-Interior Supplier," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, July 25, 2002.

——, "Milwaukee-Based Automotive Systems Maker Selects New Chairman," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, July 24, 2003.

Heinen, Tom, "Johnson Controls Official Rescues Milwaukee Holiday Parade," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, October 13, 2003.

"John Barth Selected to Chair National Minority Supplier Development Council," May 17, 2004, http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040517/cgm051_1.html.

"Johnson Controls Elects John Barth CEO; Additional Appointments and Dividend Announced," company press release, July 24, 2002, http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=105&STORY=/www/story/07-24-2002/0001770789

—Lauri R. Harding

For more information on John Barth, visit Britannica.com.

Barth, John (1930– ). American writer, known for his highly innovative experiments with different genres. For instance, his two highly acclaimed novels, The Sot‐Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat‐Boy, or The Revised New Syllabus (1966), play with the picaresque novel and the fable as science fiction. Barth's interest in fairy tales is primarily focused on the tradition of The Arabian Nights. In Chimera (1972), a collection of stories, he reintroduces Scheherazade in ‘Dunyazadiad’ and enables her to make sense out of her life and survive through stories passed back in time by Barth himself. Other fairy tales such as ‘Perseid’ and ‘Bellerophoniad’ celebrate the role of the storyteller, who endows life with significance. In another collection, The Tidewater Tales (1987), Barth makes ample use of Scheherazade and other fantastic characters from fairy tales. In his superb fairy‐tale novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Scheherazade appears again but this time she takes second place to Sindbad the sailor. In this narrative, Simon William Behler, a well‐known journalist, becomes lost overboard off the coast of Sri Lanka and eventually finds himself in Sindbad's house in medieval Baghdad. In order to return to the modern world, he must challenge Sindbad to a storytelling marathon with the hope that he can solve his predicament and overcome the crisis in his own life. The theme of re‐creation through storytelling is also prominent in Once Upon a Time (1994) in which the narrative threads of the story incorporate timeslips and illusions to form an author who is called Barth. The fairy‐tale genre has been particularly valuable for Barth, who uses the marvellous and intricate plots of transformation to demonstrate how crucial the imagination is for self‐definition and identity as boundaries keep shifting in the postmodern world.

Bibliography

• Kurk, Katherine C., ‘Narration as Salvation: Textual Ethics of Michel Tournier and John Barth’, Comparative Literature Studies, 25 (1988).
• Vickery, John B., ‘The Functions of Myth in John Barth's Chimera’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38 (1992).
• Ziegler, Heide, ‘The Tale of the Author: Or, Scheherazade's Betrayal’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10 (1990).

— Jack Zipes

Quotes:

"Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story."

John Barth
Born	May 27, 1930 (1930-05-27) (age 79) Cambridge, Maryland
Occupation	Novelist, professor
Nationality	American
Writing period	1957-

John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus).

He was a professor at Penn State University (1953-1965), SUNY Buffalo (1965-1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-1973), and Johns Hopkins University (1973-1995) before he retired in 1995.

Contents 1 Literary work 2 Awards 3 Selected works 3.1 Fiction 3.2 Nonfiction 4 External links

Literary work

Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. They are straightforward tales; as Barth later remarked, they "didn't know they were novels."

The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth's next novel, is an 800-page satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland based on the life of an actual poet, Ebenezer Cooke, who wrote a poem of the same title. The Sot-Weed Factor is what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described as "poet and virgin") is a Candide-like innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic, becomes disillusioned and ends up writing a biting satire.

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy, of comparable size, is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. In the course of the novel Giles carries out all the tasks prescribed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth kept a list of the tasks taped to his wall while he was writing the book.

The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse and the novella collection Chimera, the latter for which Barth received the National Book Award, are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. In LETTERS Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.

While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967), that was widely considered to be a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1980) wrote a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", to clarify the point.

Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.

Awards

• 1956 — Nominated for the National Book Award for The Floating Opera.
• 1966 — National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in literature.
• 1965 — The Brandeis University creative arts award in fiction.
• 1965-66 — The Rockefeller Foundation grant in fiction.
• 1968 — Nominated for the National Book Award for Lost in the Funhouse.
• 1972 — Awarded the National Book Award for Chimera.
• 1974 — Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
• 1974 — Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• 1997 — F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction.
• 1998 — Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
• 1998 — PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
• 1999 — Enoch Pratt Society's Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award.
• 2008 — Roozi Rozegari, Iranian literature prize for best foreign work translationThe Floating Opera. (For details see the external links)

Selected works

Fiction

• The Floating Opera (1957)
• The End of the Road (1958)
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
• Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966)
• Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (stories) (1968)
• Chimera (three linked novellas) (1972)
• LETTERS (1979)
• Sabbatical: A Romance (1982)
• The Tidewater Tales (1987)
• The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
• Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (memoirish novel) (1994)
• On with the Story (stories) (1996)
• Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)
• The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)
• Where Three Roads Meet (three linked novellas) (2005)
• The Development (2008)

Nonfiction

• The Friday Book (1984)
• Further Fridays (1995)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Barth

• John Barth Wins Iranian Literary Prize, Powell's Books
• John Barth's statement to Iranian literary prize, Roozi Rozegari
• John Barth Information Center
• Scriptorium - John Barth
• Reading John Barth: an essay by Charles Harris (from CONTEXT Quarterly at CenterforBookCulture.org)
• North American Postmodern Fiction: John Barth
• Barth audio goodies at the Lannan site
• Two-part interview on KCRW's radio program 'Bookworm' with Michael Silverblatt (also at the Lannan site)
• click!, a short story by John Barth centered on hypertextuality

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)