Word: perots
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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...
...example, an IBM staff member who had moved to Africa sent a postcard to a group of former colleagues who were stationed at EDS. The card pictured native women with exposed breasts. "It was like something you'd see in National Geographic," recalls Wilson. Nonetheless, Perot, who saw the postcard, fired off a letter to IBM "about how EDS employees were embarrassed by this pornography, and that we should control our employees better," says Wilson...