Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Making Soup of Campbell. When Perot finally installed the 7070 at Southwestern, he received roughly $25,000 as a commission, which he wanted to keep for himself -- to the consternation of his IBM partner, Dean Campbell. When the two first started working as a team in the late 1950s, they shared 20 insurance-company accounts. Perot agreed to work on two large, difficult accounts -- including Southwestern -- while Campbell would take the rest. Perot told his boss that he should not split the Southwestern commission with Campbell because he had done all the work. In response, Campbell argued that Perot didn...
Join Me -- or Else. Merle Volding, a former IBM manager, knows what it's like to cross Perot. He recalls that Perot quit IBM in June 1962 on a Friday afternoon, then turned up the next morning at Volding's Dallas home and spent several hours trying to persuade him to join EDS in exchange for a one-third share. "I ended up telling him that he had a good idea, but that, 'Let's face it, you and I are so different, it wouldn't last six months,' " recalls Volding, now 68. "He got upset that I turned...
Later that same year, Perot wrote to IBM chairman Thomas Watson Jr. accusing Volding "of all kinds of unethical things" in preventing his upstart company from competing against IBM, says Volding. Big Blue, having faced antitrust + charges before, in the 1950s, started an investigation but soon cleared Volding of any wrongdoing. "Ross knew damn well I wasn't unethical," he says. "I think he was just trying to get IBM to pull back and give him a free hand in signing up our customers. He used threats all the time...
Lining Up His Ducks. One former salesman, Ted Smith, now 59, recalls that shortly before Perot left IBM, he admitted to Smith that he had three contracts already signed up -- with GRC, Southwestern Life and Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Texas. A former IBM executive maintains that he has firsthand knowledge that before quitting, Perot sold additional IBM equipment to at least two of those entities, collected sales commissions and then had those firms cancel the orders once he left IBM. What's not known, he adds, is whether Perot had these clients lined up when he sold them...
...Dear IBM: %$ % %$!!*&!! Perot's relationship with IBM continued to be turbulent long after he left the company. In the late 1960s Aubrey Wilson served for nine stormy months as the EDS account manager for IBM, whose business with Perot was expanding. Wilson, 67, recalls being confronted with a stream of complaints from Perot. "He had his whole organization geared to route even the slightest provocation to his personal attention so that he could file a formal complaint," says Wilson, who retired from IBM...