[4] In 1964, Garrett was named Chairman of the Board and President of Instrument Systems Corporation (ISC), a small defense electronics company founded in College Point, Queens, in 1959.
[6][7] Following a strategy that had proved successful at Loral, Garrett transformed ISC by closing deficit-ridden plants, seeking civilian markets as well as government research-and-development contracts, and acquiring a wide array of young growth-oriented companies, mainly in defense and commercial electronics and manufacturing.
[7] ISC's biggest contracts of the Garrett era exemplified the company's continued ability to leverage innovative technologies it had developed for military or government purposes and apply them to civilian use.
[8][9] Garrett's aggressive strategy grew ISC at an astonishing rate, transforming it from a struggling small electronics company to a nationally recognized industrial conglomerate in less than a decade.
Conglomerates had fallen out of favor with investors, U.S. defense spending decreased as the Vietnam War winded down, and two oil crises and the recessions of 1973–1975 and the early 1980s further diminished ISC's prospects.