Name Change and Headquarters Move
R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., which began as R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1875, and changed its name in 1970, became RJR Nabisco on April 25, 1986 after the company's $4.9 billion purchase of Nabisco Brands Inc. in 1985.
In August 1986, the RJR Nabisco board announced that F. Ross Johnson would replace J. Tylee Wilson as head of the company effective January 1, 1987. Soon after that, Johnson, believing "bucolic" Winston-Salem did not have the right image for a "world-class company", began looking at other possible headquarters cities. The company decided against New York City and Dallas, Texas. Atlanta was selected because it was "nouveau riche and overbuilt". On January 15, 1987, the RJR Nabisco board approved a headquarters move from Winston-Salem to Cobb County, Georgia, north of Atlanta, where the company had rented space. The move would affect 250 to 300 employees, while Winston-Salem would still have 14,000 people working for the company. RJR Nabisco donated the 519,000-square-foot World Headquarters Building to Wake Forest University but continued to use it until the September 1987 move. Later, RJR Nabisco's Planters-Life Savers Division moved to the former headquarters building.
Read more about this topic: RJR Nabisco
Famous quotes containing the words change, headquarters and/or move:
“How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the national security is involved, anything goes. There are no rules. There are people so lacking in roots about what is proper and what is improper that they don’t know there’s anything wrong in breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party.”
—Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900–1980)
“The idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)