Page 100 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

organization. If you are too tightly aligned with that boss, and he loses, all
bets are off on your career, too.
Let me tell you about my own experience as a spear carrier in such a fight
to the finish.During the early 1980s,I worked for Commercial Credit,a sub-
sidiary of Control Data, which was once a great computer company that
had rivaled IBM—but had since bought
dozens, if not hundreds, of unrelated

YOU NEED EYES businesses. It had turned into one of
AND EARS those Noah’s Ark corporations, where
WHEREVER YOU everything belonged simply because it
CAN WIN THEM. was in the animal kingdom.
At the Control Data headquarters in
Minneapolis, somebody had the idea of
using a lot of these mismatched beasts in a new type of business center, a
pre-Kinkos kind of place where you could improve your mind using
PLATO, Control Data’s interactive educational system. Or you could use
a Control Data mainframe to get your payroll processed. Or you could
buy business insurance. Or you could get a loan for your business. Or you
could buy a building to house it.
It was one-stop shopping, as convenient and appealing as being able to
go to a tire store to buy cologne.
At first, Control Data had four or five different divisions in various
parts of the country creating these business centers, and the race was on
as to whose concept was the smartest. Then, after many, many millions of
dollars had been wasted, instead of abandoning this flawed idea, head-
quarters decided to consolidate all these competing efforts in Baltimore
under Commercial Credit, a consumer finance company, the very least
likely place to put it. That way we could waste even more money—in one
location instead of five.
So dozens of executives were transferred to Baltimore from all over the
country and began to form new teams. Some were legitimate executives
taking their best people with them.And some were the worst people being

80